Charlie Denton interview

Charlie Denton Interview

Hear interview excerpts:

Garcia Hunt: Today is July 13, 2001. My name is Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt. I'm happy to be here in the Cline Library with Charlie Denton, who has spent many years in wildland management and ecology. This interview will be part of an ongoing project entitled "Fire on the Plateau." Jennifer Kern is also present in the room.

Garcia Hunt: Good morning, Charlie.

Denton: Good morning.

Garcia Hunt: Could you please tell us a little about yourself, where you're from, and maybe follow right into your education?

Denton: Okay. I was born and raised in a small mining town in the southeast corner of the state—Morenci, a small copper-mining town. I graduated from there, and I started here at NAU, although it was Arizona State College at Flagstaff at the time in 1962. I graduated from here in 1966 with a degree in forest management. I then went on and worked for the state of Arizona at the reform school, teaching forestry classes and some fire stuff in Fort Grant. Then I went to work for the Coronado National Forest on two or three different districts there. And then with the Tonto National Forest. And in 1967, in the fall, I got drafted and spent a couple of years in the army, a year in Vietnam, and came back and spent five years on the Gila, and then transferred and spent five more years on the Kaibab National Forest here. And then I accepted a district ranger job on Apache-Sitgreaves in Springerville, and spent the next eighteen years there doing district ranger work on that ranger district, and also spent three years as a district ranger on the Alpine Ranger District.

Then in 1997, I transferred to the regional office as the assistant director of fire in charge of wildland fire operations. And that was the position I had when I retired last fall in August of 2000.

My fire career started in 1962 here in Flagstaff. At the time, the School of Forestry had one or two crews of firefighters that we kept for the Forest Service, and they used us quite a bit. I went on a fire that fall, and have been doing fire ever since. Although I never really had a fire position until my last one, when I went to Albuquerque, I maintained all my fire qualifications, because back in those days, everybody did. I went up in the fire organization and spent a lot of time doing crew liaison work for the Southwest Indian firefighters. Took a lot of crews to the Northwest and all over the United States.

In 1978, I became a division boss on one of the national Type I teams. And in 1983, I became a line boss on that fire team. And then in 1989, I became a national incident commander on one of the national teams, and had that position for six years. They only allowed you to stay in a position for five years. They asked me to stay for six, because we were running out of trained people. So I trained a deputy at the time to take my place.

In 1997, I became one of the four national area commanders, and was one of those until the time of my retirement last year. I started out as a firefighter and went to the top, but it took a lot of years and a lot of training to do that. That's a brief sketch of my history.

Garcia Hunt: That's a wide range of positions there. Could you tell us some of the different positions you've held throughout your career?

Denton: The first permanent job I had with the Forest Service was a minerals guard on the Globe District, giving out permits to miners for roads and so on to their mining claims. And then I went to the next district where I did partial recreation and partially range management, and doing range analysis and production utilization studies. Then the next job I had was as a timber marker and a scaler. Then I went to the Army, and when I came back I was recreation, lands, and fire, and watershed, and timber [staff?] on the Glenwood District of the Gila, and did that for five years. That was real good, 'cause I got a wide variety of experience doing that, and that's really when I really caught on, and really started doing a lot of off-forest firefighting duties.

Then I transferred in 1974, to the Kaibab, and was the recreation lands staff on the Williams District for five years. My next job was the district ranger, which is administrative manager for, I think it was a 300,000-acre district on the Apache-Sitgreaves, which was responsible for all the functional activities—recreational, lands, timber, range, watershed, fodder, and all that—for the next eighteen years.

So I had a wide variety of background in doing that. And again, at the same time, kept up all of my fire qualifications.

Garcia Hunt: Can you describe a little about maybe what your day was like when you were out on the Kaibab? Like what you did when you came into work?

Denton: On the Kaibab? The three biggest responsibilities were the recreation activities on the district, which the biggest one were the campgrounds at Cataract Lake, Kaibab Lake, and Whitehorse Lake—campgrounds. That was probably 35 or 40 percent of my job. And the next portion was dealing with a number of special use permits that varied all the way from highway and railroad easements, to power lines, to summer homes....

[Tr.'s note: Electronic buzz obscures comment, approximately 30 seconds lost. After this point, narrator's microphone not working—voice being picked up only by interviewer's microphone, making him more difficult to discern. Accuracy of transcription from this point cannot be assured.]

Denton: ... drug (unclear) popular place (unclear). We got a lot of stolen cars and so on that came out of California. Anyway, that was all interesting.

At the same time we had a lot of district fires, went on a lot of district fires on the Kaibab, on the north side of the Grand Canyon, on the North Kaibab, and had a good time.

Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us a little bit about your first fire?

Denton: The first fire I was on, as I remember, I actually lied about my age because I was only seventeen at the time. We went up and signed up at Knob Hill, which that ranger station doesn't exist anymore. It's up where the hospital is right now, and the Forest Service used to have an office up there. And we signed up, and I remember I had to borrow a pair of boots, because I didn't even have any boots at the time. We went out, and really didn't know what we were supposed to do, that sort of thing. We were on a crew, and there were two, three members of the crew that had some experience and kind of showed the new guys what we were supposed to do. I'll never forget, it was a fall, wind-driven fire, and it was really cold. Some people would come by and say, "The wind's really going to blow. We want you to cover up all these stumps and all the logs and all that, so sparks don't blow everywhere and start new fires." So we spent some time doing that. Then some other people come by and say, "What are you guys doing? We want all this stuff uncovered, get it cooled off and all that." So we'd dig it all up again. That happened two or three times that night.

Then the next morning it snowed six or eight inches. I remember they put us on a bus, and the bus slid off the road, and (chuckles) (unclear). And I wondered, "What am I getting into?!" Things haven't changed a whole lot in the last forty years, but those sorts of things still happen.

Garcia Hunt: Can you tell us about some of the training that you went through besides that first time?

Denton: All the training [I] went through—and I don't remember all the course numbers and so on—but all the basic firefighter training, fire behavior training, aviation training with fire. All that stuff, as many of them—I can't hardly separate them, but there was a lot. In fact, in those days, they really relied heavily on on-the-job training, too. I got a lot of that done, and as I remember, they waived a bunch of classes because of my fire experience. When I was on the Gila, after I got out of the Army, I started teaching some fire classes, mostly dealing with fire behavior and those sorts of things. And as it went on, the way the classes go, there's 100-level classes, 200-, 300-, 400-, 500-, and 600-level classes. And as you go up, you take all the 100 classes, 200-level classes, 300, and as you go up. I took all those through my career.

The biggest one that you go to, that's a real milestone is [head?] 520, which at the time was called Fire Generalship. I think it's now called Advanced Fire Management. And it's a national course, interagency course, and it's a requirement to be—you have to pass it as a requirement for any command or general staff position on up, on a national Type I team. And it's [in a park?]. It's two weeks long, and we still put it on. It's two weeks long, and you work night and day. The biggest thing, there is a ten-hour simulation exercise at the end of it. It's either pass/fail. I think still between 20 and 25 percent of the people don't pass it. And these are skilled, trained, firefighters, but the class is really difficult. And it's difficult on purpose, because if you want people to fail, that's where you want them to fail, is in the classroom, not out on the job.

Garcia Hunt: Can you describe some of that?

Denton: The simulation is really tough. They put you in a little room about a quarter of this size, and there's five or six or seven of you, whatever it is, and everything is done. They have role-players that come in the room, and you have radios, just like you would in a real-life situation, and a couple of telephones. I mean, they run you through all sorts of things. And it's all real-life stuff. I mean, there's no tricks played, although there's a time problem. And they're all real-life things that actually have happened on fires, where helicopters crash and trucks crash, and people get burned over, and they want to see how you react to that, and make sure you close the loop. And the training is a team training exercise, because in order to be there, you already, one of the criteria is you already have to be qualified at that level. But what the training is for is to make sure that you operate in a team mode, not independently. And that is what is hard, because about the time that you need to talk with the logistics chief or the safety officer about something, they are also involved in some other problem. It's real difficult. I've been on I don't know how many hundreds of fires since then, but I can remember that simulation exercise like it was yesterday. I remember sweating through the top of my boots. I mean, it was difficult. At the end of the day you're just plumb wore out.

Well anyway, that's what that is. And I went through that in 1981, I believe. It was one of those things, as I said, is a milestone—extremely proud of being nominated to go to the class to begin with, and then passing it was a real relief.

But then after I did that, they asked me to go to Area Command which is at 620, and it's the final class that you go to in fire management because there isn't anything higher than that. And that's to become a national area commander, and the requirements of that are you have to be one of the national incident commanders first, and be qualified to do that. I did that in 1996, and that simulation exercise is concurrent with the other exercise that's going on. You have the teams doing their stuff, the area command is supposed to be coordinating all that. So obviously, in the simulation exercise, when one of the teams or one of the team members starts doing the wrong thing, it affects the area command - you have to try and fix all that - and you're graded on that too. And there's only four of you on an area command unit. That wasn't as difficult as 520, but it was difficult, and it needs to be.

Anyway, as part of that… both classes are put on every second year. I started instructing portions of that in either 1994 or 1995, I can't remember. I did that for three rounds. I taught Southwest fire strategies and tactics. I can't remember some of the other courses. I was involved with that for a long time. And that takes two years, so they start two years in advance for that class schedule. As soon as it's over, a couple of months later, the cadre meets and starts putting the next thing together, it takes two years to make sure that everything's working and it takes and a number of people. It takes, I think there's over seventy instructors in those classes, and there must be another forty or fifty simulations, exercise people, blow fires, and people that are running the radios and all that. Takes a lot of effort and a lot of coordination to put that on. But I was really glad to be involved in that, too.

Garcia Hunt: When you became cadre?

Denton: yeah …yes.

Garcia Hunt: You were the person teaching what you've gone through….Could you describe some of the special equipment that you use during any kind of process like that?

Denton: In the teaching or....

Garcia Hunt: Both.

Denton: One of the things that we found out in teaching that, you know, when you get a bunch of firefighters together, any group of people who have a skill level together, you end up talking war stories and all that. But some of that, when you're in front of a class and you're dealing with people that have been dealing with fire for twenty or twenty-five years, they want to hear—and what we tried to do—they want to hear real live stories of problems that you've had in actual situations when you're out on a fire, and how you solved them. One of the classes I taught was—and I can't remember the title of it—but it was how outside influences affect your decisions on large fires, because when you're out on public land and there's social issues and political issues, and health issues, and all those things going on, you get pressured into a lot of stuff.

I'll never forget Molly Firekey [phonetic] went to, responded to Hurricane Andrew in Louisiana in 1992. And that was after the hurricane had went through Florida and devastated Homestead Air Force Base and all that. And if you remember, 1992 was a political year, and it was the end of Bush Sr.'s administration, and it was just — FEMA really caught hell for not responding properly in Florida. Well, the hurricane went across the Gulf of Mexico and hit Louisiana. Well, by the time it hit Louisiana, they wanted to do something. Up to that point in time, the Washington office of the Forest Service had been dealing with FEMA. "We've got teams—although they're fire teams—who really have skills in logistics. We know how to move stuff. We can move stuff from the fire standpoint much faster. The military used to come, and they ran a budget study on how we mobilized people and equipment faster than they did, because we can move stuff across the United States in a heartbeat. I mean, thousands of people, much faster than they can. And that includes the president."

So they had talked to FEMA about that, so FEMA, based on all the political heat that they were catching and all that, asked for our team to come down there, although they had no idea what they were going to use us for or anything else. They were just trying to cover themselves. Fire teams are extremely aggressive. They don't like sitting around. When you get called somewhere, you want to go do something. And we were sitting in an old military base in Alexandria, Louisiana. I kept going to the meetings over there, and kept trying to tell them, "We're ready to go. Tell us to do something, we'll go do it." They hesitated and they hesitated and the hours went by, and finally we went and rented a bunch of cars and my command of general staff and eight others, drove down a couple hundred miles into south Louisiana, so we could see what we might be getting into, and went back and explained to them.

They said, "Well, we had not heard from all those people down there"—this was FEMA talking—"so obviously there must not be a problem." Well, south Louisiana's a little bit different down there. When you grow all the crops in the United States fire districts. Every piece, geographic area, has their own way to do business. People in south Louisiana do things their own way. Those Cajuns, they do things their own way. The last thing they wanted to do was get involved with the federal government—of any government. It would be like comparing Coconino County—and Coconino County has a big county structure—and comparing that with Greenlee County or Apache County. There's a big difference in the capabilities of what you can do. Or city government would be the same thing. You can't compare Flagstaff with Winslow or Holbrook. It's a different thing.

Those people didn't know that—they were in a world of hurt and trouble, and they didn't know how to go about asking for [help]. But anyway, to make a long story short, I was standing there in the middle of the road when the FEMA guy, I was trying to explain to the FEMA guy exactly what we could do for them, and was in a room that had, I can't remember, I think there were thirty-four phones in the room, a big long table, phones ringing all over. I don't know how they got anything done. Anyway, the military guy that was answering the telephone walked up and said, "We've got problems." The guy said, "What?" He said, "We just got a call from the White House, and they got a call from the mayor of Franklin, Louisiana, who said they wanted some help and they wanted it now." So the guy said, "Hey, if they don't follow the rules, [they won't get help?]," which shocked me.

Then it seemed like we're just down there doing nothing, and about fifteen minutes later the same guy who received the telephone call got another call from the White House and they said they'd better not get another call from the mayor, so you've got to do something about it. And the guy turned around and put his finger right in the middle of my chest and he said, "Can you go down there and fix the problem, whatever it is?" And I said, "You bet." And you know I did. But we went down there and really helped, really helped out. That was our only non-fire assignment that I had in all the years before. We do the same thing. We do the same sort of logistics thing, we do the same sort of intelligence gathering. Instead of fighting fires, your on-the-ground people are distributing food or opening roads or whatever need be.

But those are the sorts of things in that training that people want to hear about. You get into boxes like that. Put out a fire in southern California, it really gets political in southern California when you have a fire that's threatening a real high-value community—you're talking million-dollar houses. And next door, down the road two miles, you're dealing with a community that's been there for a long time, and they're just people like you and me, and everything that they own is in their house. Everything, every bit of money they've ever saved was put in their house. And you have a fire going, and you're getting pressure from this group to "save our houses," and you get pressure from this group to save these houses and so on. And across the way there was an Indian reservation that said, "You'd better not let that fire get on us."

And those are the sorts of things that in that training people want to hear, real-life stories and how you solved them—not that that was the best way, but that's the way we solved it at the time. "How would you do it different?" you know, and those sorts of things that you just sit down with the people, and that's 520, and some of those courses would say, "These are the outside pressures. It's not just figuring out where the fire is going, but strategy tactics that is in the fire behavior and the fuels and the topography and all that. You're dealing with people." And the same thing that happened in that thing with California. The highway patrol come along and we evacuated this community, and they come along, they wouldn't even let people back in. I said, "I think we can let 'em back in tomorrow." And he said to not do that, and I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, we're checking out a bunch of drugs and meth labs and stuff in there. If you could keep people out for three or four more days, we'd appreciate it so we could check all the legal stuff out." So we did. Those are things you get into.

Those are the stories that people want to hear, at that level, and need to hear, because it's not just firefighting—they've been taught in classes up to that point in time. It's all these outside influences that take effect. We have always said that large fires in even-numbered years are tough, because they're political years. And when you're dealing with a year like last year, which was a national election year—even bigger, even bigger. You deal a lot with congressional representatives and senators, because they want to make a big splash. They're running for office, and they're always, "How can we help? What can we do to help?" Well, by that time, it's beyond help! (laughs).

Garcia Hunt: For the record, can you describe FEMA and what is FEMA?

Denton: FEMA's the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and they deal mostly with floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, those sorts of things. They actually, they are set up organizationally very similar to the way fire organizations are set up. However, what they don't have is an operational portion of their organization. And their operational thing—operational stuff, in fire terms is the suppression portion of the fire organization. Traditionally, fire teams or incident teams are separated: safety; information; command; operations, which are actually the people putting the fires out; plans; logistics…I'm missing something.

Kern: Finance.

Denton: Finance - thank you. (laughs) And the operations people are the people actually in charge of the suppression activities. FEMA has that, but in the operations section, they actually—and I didn't know this until 1992, and most people don't know this—FEMA doesn't go fix stuff. They have, in their organization, in their operational section, that is made up of eighteen different agencies: Corps of Engineers, and a whole bunch of other agencies. The Department of Agriculture, if there is fire involved. And they re-assign fixing roads, debris clean-up and all that, to one of those eighteen units, whether it be the National Guard, whether it be the Corps of Engineers, whoever it may be. So there's a myth that FEMA comes in and cleans up all the stuff, and in fact, they don't. On public land, they have these eighteen agencies that deal with that. But then they turn around and contact …

Garcia Hunt: So can you tell us a little bit about, as an incident commander, when a military force is called in, how that process is done?

Denton: That's kind of done in two different ways. We have agreements with the federal government and the state, with almost everywhere in the West there's a National Guard unit. And National Guard units are used frequently—some for some aviation skills and transporting not troops but transporting equipment, those sorts of things. In some areas, like in Wyoming, they have kitchens and so on that they help out with fire. Mostly, in this part of the world here in Arizona, and in New Mexico, we use National Guard for ground transportation, and always have, and it works out really slick, 'cause they have a bunch of six bodies and so on that we transport troops in. And that's pretty common.

When the military comes in, there is a draw-down nationally to where at some point where there is no more firefighters left, we can call on the military. And they come in the battalion-size outfit, fully contained, 500 people. They're not a full twenty crews because they have a lot of overhead with it—you know, truck drivers and (unclear)—but you get about twenty crews out of a battalion. And they're trained as what we'd call Type II crews. Again, they are not called in until all the other firefighters, you've drained the system and there aren't any left. I think last year we used four or five battalions of military—something like that.

Garcia Hunt: In a situation like Los Alamos, Cerro Grande, can you describe something of how you dealt with that?

Denton: With Cerro Grande? (chuckles) I could talk about that for a long time. What happened with Cerro Grande, with me personally, as a matter of fact, before it started I was here in Flagstaff, because I was on my way back to Albuquerque from dealing with the Coon Creek Fire on the Tonto. And I got called from the deputy forest supervisor on the Santa Fe, and we were discussing a meeting that we were both going to in Montana, which was supposed to take place the next week. And he said that the Park Service was getting ready to have a prescribed fire adjacent to the Santa Fe, and that they were really concerned whether they were going to be able to hold it. And the reason he said that was they had been taking fuel moisture measurements on the Santa Fe, especially on the west side of the Santa Fe, all winter and into the spring. And they had recorded some of the lowest fuel moisture measurements anybody had ever heard of. So it was quite obvious that they were really dry on that side of the forest. And they had stopped all prescribed fires and those sorts of things on the Santa Fe already.

Well anyway, to make a long story short, they went ahead and lit that thing, and it got away two, three times. The Santa Fe sent a hotshot crew—the Santa Fe Hotshots—there. They called me. I was talking with Paul Roscoe [phonetic], the FMO there, a couple of times a day, because I was still here. He said on Saturday—I think it was Saturday—they were all going to meet up there, all the people involved, the people from the city of Los Alamos, the Department of Energy, the Los Alamos Lab people in Santa Fe, Bandelier National Park—they were all going to meet. I talked to him on Saturday after that Saturday evening. He said it looked like everything was going to be all right. They lost it a couple of times and all that. (phone rings, tape paused) Well anyway, when they were in the process, when it was still fairly small and they'd lost it a couple of times, I happened to know (aside about phone message) that the Mormon Lake Hotshots from here on the Coconino were on their way back from a fire, I think on the Lincoln. And I called the coordination center in Albuquerque and said, "Hey, call Mormon Lake on the radio and stop them. They're going to need them on that fire. Either hold them in Albuquerque or send them up there, whatever they do." I think they had already gone through Albuquerque and they were at Grants already, and (unclear) got them turned around and sent right up there. And they spent the next two days, those two hotshot crews, and I think a Type II crew, trying to stop that thing.

Everybody knows what happened next. The wind caught hold of it and blew it all over the place. It was a really tough situation. On Sunday night, before the national fire team got there, the Mormon Lake Hotshot crew—the fire was headed toward town, and the Mormon Lake Hotshot crew, and it just so happened that the overhead that had been called in, the individual overhead, the division group supervisors, they were all from here on the Coconino, that were trying to stop that thing. In fact, the air attack person was also a Coconino person, although at that time he was working out of Albuquerque. They made a call that they needed to burn out the road going to the ski area, and the road that split the Los Alamos Lab from the Santa Fe National Forest. And they spent that late afternoon and evening burning that out. If they wouldn't have done that, that fire would have been into the center of Los Alamos that night. The call that they made there, and the work that they saved—I mean, no telling. It would have been an ugly situation. As it worked out, the fire went into town three days later and actually just caught the edge of it, and lost 200-and-some houses.

There's going to be debates over that for a while. As you know, there were three or four different investigations looking at that from different viewpoints and all that. And of course I have my own viewpoint over that. And all the people that were there on the fire, you talk to the two hotshot crews, they have a different opinion of what went on and what didn't go on during the first two, three days of that thing, whether the decisions were wise or not. In my own opinion, I looked at the plan and I looked at the situation, all that other stuff—in my opinion, it was a poor plan, they didn't think far enough ahead if something would have went wrong. The odds of them, with the people that they had…Even if the weather would have been right, they just didn't think it out, in my opinion. It was a poor plan, and then when they implemented it, it was even worse. And it doesn't make them bad people. I know a lot of those people that were there—it doesn't make them bad, I just think they got complacent. They'd been doing Bandelier, doing a lot of prescribed fire for a lot of years, and I think they got complacent. It happens a lot—people confuse good luck with good planning. And when you get by with some things, instead of recognizing that maybe we got away with something this time—they looked at that as, "Hey, this is a good way of doing business." That happens a lot. But anyway, that's my personal opinion, having been involved in all that.

Garcia Hunt: So with the National Guard coming in also, how did you work with them also?

Denton: Those are all done by the incident team that…works directly for the logistics chief on the fire, and it works out slick. The only time I personally worked with the military was I was in an area command in Eastern Oregon, and we had a battalion of Marines. A go-gettin' outfit. And the Army - "Would you rather be in Washington where it's cool, even though you're on a fire, or being down at Camp Pendleton?" They liked going out and doing stuff like that. But they require a separate kitchen, activity map, separate ordering system and all that. But other than that, they take care of all themselves. And in a lot of respects, they're pretty simple. When you have a personnel problem or whatever in the military, they take care of all that. If you have a group, a crew, or whatever, that's not performing, you just tell the military liaison guy and he gets it fixed. You don't have to deal with any of that as a problem. It works out pretty good.

My opinion is, probably in the long run, down the road, because we're getting shorter and shorter on firefighters, fire is getting bigger and all that other stuff, we probably need to work out something to where we're using the military more often rather than less often, because we used them in 1994, and then we used them in 1996, and then we didn't use them again until last year. By the time you call them out again, everybody is brand new. There isn't a person left in that battalion that has any fire experience, because they've all transferred, gone away, got out of the Army, whatever it is. But if we would use these same units consistently on an annual basis, you wouldn't have this situation where you have got to train from ground zero every time. But that's a big political thing—the military will tell you that they're not there to fight fires, they're there for a different reason. And that's exactly right. Then if you start depending on them, then you have a situation that we had in the Mideast in the early nineties. You can't depend on the military, even though you've trained them, 'cause they're off doing their job. So that becomes a little bit of a bind when you start planning on the military being in the mix.

Garcia Hunt: Give us a little insight on evacuation plans. Maybe you can start with Flagstaff, and then maybe go to how did it work with Cerro Grande and international, maybe, incidents.

Denton: Well, the way that land management agencies are put together, the agency administrator who is in charge of—whether it be a district ranger or a park superintendent, or a superintendent for one of the BIA agencies—are responsible for protection of communities or any improvements on a piece of land, a geographic piece of land. For example, when I was a district ranger in Springerville, we had the little community of Greer, which is at risk of fire. And it was my responsibility as the district ranger to make sure that we worked with the county and the local law enforcement agency to make sure that if something bad happened in there, we had an evacuation plan that would work: Where were we going to put all the people? Where were we going to put all the vehicles? Who was going to do what? Evacuations are the responsibility of the county and the local law enforcement agencies. It is not the federal agency that's responsible for that. Same thing with search and rescue and all those working things—they are not the responsibility of the federal agencies, they are the responsibilities of local law enforcement agencies. So, for example, the evacuation of Flagstaff would be the responsibility of the Coconino County sheriff. And Los Alamos, it was the responsibility of Los Alamos County sheriff. Did they have to coordinate together? Absolutely. And it's set, and it's the responsibility of those agency administrators and law officers to make sure that this is all done in advance. Is it done everywhere? No. You know, you could spend probably a lifetime doing that. A lot of communities, for example, in southern California, holy

smoke. On a federal piece of property you've got who knows how many communities involved in that. But you have to sit down and plan it all out with the local law enforcement agencies, and then when it happens, when you hit that trigger point and you say, "Now is the time," it's all set, everybody knows what they're supposed to do. And they had it set up in Los Alamos. The problem, as it is in most of the West, very few roads, narrow roads. You've got fire equipment coming in, and people trying to get out. That's a real problem. And that's why you do a lot of preplanning and make sure it's all fixed and planned beforehand.

Garcia Hunt: For instance, search and rescue you mentioned, missing persons in federal forests—the same?

Denton: What would happen—and it happens a lot—is the first one would more than likely come to the land management agency. For example, the Forest Service. When somebody gets lost, a lost hiker or lost hunter, that is reported. The federal agency would then in turn call the county sheriff and say, "This is the information we have," and then offer help—maps, radios, people to help with searches—all that. But the search and all of that is the responsibility of the county sheriff. And the county sheriff may say, "Is there a possibility of using your helicopter?" and then we have to work out a deal with that, too, because the helicopter is under contract to do certain things. You know, it's a contractual thing. But those things are done all the time. It's their responsibility, but the federal agency is always helping one way or the other. The situation at Grand Canyon National Park works a little bit different, because they have their own search and rescue outfit at the canyon, and they do their own thing inside the park, and I'm not just sure how all that works.

Garcia Hunt: Growing up in New Mexico near Albuquerque in Santana, I've noticed that Kirtland was used a lot for like [Loose Trail?], Gila, Santa Fe National. So is that....

Denton: They have some helicopters that are designated for that, and they have an agreement, I think back through the National Guard, on the use of that. They are used a lot.

Garcia Hunt: Can you give us, as division boss, going back a little bit, what was your most memorable fire? We'll go through maybe, if you want to start off with maybe district ranger first, your most memorable fire, and then maybe division boss, and then we'll go to maybe national area commander, and then director maybe. Or you can start off where you want.

Denton: District ranger job is the best job, I think, in the Forest Service. I used to have a friend who retired as a ranger over here on the Williams District, on the Kaibab, used to say, "Any work on a district ranger job is downhill rather than whether you go up to another office or not." It's because you have a lot of independence, and what you do on a daily basis. And in actuality, you're responsible for the short- and long-range planning, and getting things done, and you can pick and choose priorities—within a certain realm you can. The way the money is done, especially in the Forest Service, you don't just get money and go do things. You get money for specific projects, and it's based on you're going to get $150 an acre to do thinning, and you're going to get so much money for this recreation area, or for this specific project in proportion. But you've got a budget you've got to work within, but you have a lot of flexibility in that. The reason I liked it, 'cause I was involved—I mean, every day is a new day. You may be working on recreation issues one day, and fire issues the next day, and timber management issues the next day, or all during the same day. And range management issues, and you're dealing with permittees, contractors, recreationists, internal people. I just had a great time doing that. It's still probably the best job in the Forest Service, and I really enjoyed that.

Plus the responsibility is to train people at the same time, and it's always nice to see that the people you helped train, that worked for you, have gone on to bigger and better things. That's always a nice thing to see.

So anyway, a district ranger gets involved in a lot of things, and you also get involved in things that don't have anything to do specifically with your ranger district, because you get put on regional committees or national committees dealing with all sorts of things, whether they be fire issues or recreation issues. So you may be put on a committee dealing with recreation trails for the rest of the United States, and what do we need to do to prioritize those, and get those done right. Or fire issues and how do we train people? We're lacking skilled people. How do we get it back into the system to where we get people trained right on the ground, and get the right amount of training, because they have other things to do, besides just that. Large fire management in the federal agency is mostly done by non-fire people. If it's a large fire team, made up of people from all walks of life, from district rangers to administrative assistants or contracting officers or recreation specialists, there's timber specialists, range specialists. But I have my national incident team, with twenty-seven members. Only nine of them were fire people, that did fire jobs for a living. The rest of us were a mixture of stuff that had maintained our skills. And it's still that way to a great extent.

So you can't just train people in fire all the time, because the range guy that you're trying to train to be a division boss has got to do his range training, and do his range job, and do his range analysis stuff back home. And his district ranger may say, "You can only go to one fire class a year," or "one fire class every two years" or whatever, "because you've got all these other jobs that you've got to get done." So it's a mixed bag of juggling, and that's one of the things I enjoyed with the district ranger, trying to figure out how you were going to balance all that to make sure that everybody got trained, not just in fire, but a whole bunch of things, to where the more you specialize, the more trouble you get into, to where if your time and attendance clerk is sick, and he or she is the only person that knows how to fill out time sheets, you're in a world of hurt. But you've got to make sure that everybody can do a whole bunch of things, where if somebody is gone on a fire or on vacation or sick or something, somebody can fill in, and the ball can keep rolling.

Garcia Hunt: So it's exactly the same, doing division boss work also?

Denton: Kind of tying it in as a district ranger, almost like an incident commander. An incident commander you're doing the same thing: juggling finance, the logistics, the operations stuff, the safety stuff. It's that same sort of thing. You can't get in there, your job is not to get in there and do it all yourself. Your job is to make sure that all the people that you have doing that are skilled, trained, and qualified to do the job, and they're coordinating with each other to do that. So, to me, it was a real easy step to become an incident commander, because I'd been a district ranger for a long time, and it was just like the same thing.

The thing about going to a fire is, a lot of things in forestry are long-term. When you go thin and you do a lot of things, you have to wait years or even decades for the response that you want. And by that time, you've transferred and you've gone on and all that other stuff, and you're doing other things. When you're dealing with a fire, things are instantaneous. Any decision that you make: when you make a bad decision, you don't have to wait very long to find out whether it was bad or not. But boy, it is really gratifying to everybody—everybody knows what the mission is, you go out there, you do it as a group, and you can look back and it's instantaneous, you can see the effort that you all put forth and what you did. You saved so many acres and you stopped the fire here or there. You kept it from going into that drainage or into this community, or those sorts of things.

And as it goes down, a division boss, if you really like hefty stuff, and those sorts of things, a division boss or a division group supervisor, I believe it's called now, is really a great position to be in. That's the person who's really on the ground, that's been the company commander or platoon leaders or whatever you wish to call it, they're the people on the ground, making sure that it actually gets done. When the plans are made, those plans actually come from—if it's done correctly—come from the division group supervisor, because that's the individual that's stomping the line, assigning the crews to do this or that, whether they be crews, engines, helicopters, whatever they need on a geographic piece of line. It is his or her responsibility to not only make sure that they request the people that they need, but that they plan it out tactical-wise, that it can get done and watch out for their safety and all those things at the same time—which is a real on-the-ground manager. And when the plans are made for the next shift, or the next operational crew, then those plans should come from the person on the ground. He or she tells the operations section chief, and the operations section chief puts that in the plan, and the plan is lined up. If it isn't done that way, somebody's making the plans that hasn't been out there. But division group supervisor, I used to love going out as the division group supervisor, 'cause it was usually just really great. I didn't like the logistical stuff, as it was. When I got to the fire, I went out to the line, come back, camp was set up, all the other stuff. "That's where you sleep, and that's where you eat." All I had to do was worry about what was going on, out on the line, and that's where everything has to go.

In an operational plane, (unclear), those division people are the key people in getting things done. Absolutely key. Like any other position, you have a lot of really good ones, and we had some weak ones, but boy, it doesn't take long to figure out when things aren't gettin' done and you have do something about it. But division group supervisor takes a lot of skill, a lot of training and a lot of experience to get to there. But boy, they are real key people - if you don't have key individual group supervisors, boy, you're just going to have a tough time constructing a line for the fire.

Garcia Hunt: You also mentioned international incidents. Have you done any training internationally—Mexico, Australia, or either overseas?

Denton: What….what we have, in this part of the country, we have sent some crew and some advisors to Canada. They asked me to go to Australia here a couple of years ago to deal with some things. But the Coronado National Forest in this state has an agreement with the—I can't remember, one of the northern states of Mexico. I can't remember where it is. And they have an agreement to work back and forth across the international boundary, because there are a lot of fires that start in the United States that go into Mexico, and vice versa. Of course we're always concerned about each other's fires when you have a fire that's threatening each other. And they've had an agreement down there for probably the last fifteen years on doing that.

When I was a national incident commander, I took not my entire fire team, but probably took twelve or fourteen of them to an advanced Spanish class in New Mexico. It's every three weeks. I think it was two weeks, and it's total immersion—you can't talk English, and if you're not very good at Spanish yet, so you can't converse in that, and you've forgotten how to talk English after about a week, pretty soon you're just pointing and communicating. It's really something. We ended up, by the end of the two-week period, we did a whole planning session in Spanish, and used video also. Our goal was to deal with international incidents, if they would request a team to go to Mexico, is that we would have one of the eighteen national teams that was well-versed in Spanish—or at least enough to where we could get around and communicate and do some things. We never ended up getting a call down there or anything.

But there is still an agreement. We send a lot of advisors to Mexico in two- and three- and four-people groups. And we send people to Guatemala almost every year.

Denton: We sent a lot of advisors to Mexico in 1998. But it was an election year. All the fires that were coming out of Mexico was putting smoke into Texas. We all know who the governor of Texas was at the time. But we sent a lot of advisors down there. And in fact, because of our political system we got there a little bit ahead of time. We actually sent pieces of teams down there as advisors, logistics people, and some . But that was almost as a form of being forced on the Mexican government, because the way our politicians react.

Garcia Hunt: How about national-incident-wise?

Denton: National-incident-wise, I've been on fires in Florida and Virginia and Louisiana and the Canadian border in Montana and Idaho, Washington. I've been on fires in almost every western state. I was an advisor on a fire in Long Island, New York, here about five years ago. That was really something. When you're on one of these fire teams you can either be on a fire, or you could be sent anywhere, anytime. You just don't know. You're on call all the time, and when something happens in Kentucky that they need to know, you get a phone call and say, "Hey, you need to be in Frankfort, Kentucky, at ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Make arrangements on how to get there that work." or, with my team, "You have to be in [Troy?], Montana by tomorrow night at six o'clock." Shows 'em how fast we can move.

Within the states of Arizona and New Mexico, when our team got called, we could be up and running, actually operating in a twelve-hour period. And most of the time you have to do all that, you have to move and put everything together at nighttime, because most of the time we get called at seven or eight at night. By eight o'clock the next morning, we have everything up and running. And that's just consistent. If we had to go somewhere else, it took twenty-four hours. But within twenty-four hours of being called, we mobilize everybody and get them up there and get all the plans done, get all the information gathered, and all that. Within twenty-four hours, we had everything up and running. We did that consistently. And that's how quick those teams can move. I said the military looked at it a lot, on how we were able to do it. But we're not bound by a bunch of military bureaucracy either.

Garcia Hunt: For instance, on deployment, transportation-wise. Are you commercially using commercial aircraft, or are you using military aircraft?

Denton: Both. That's something, Robert, that's changed over the years a lot. Way back when we were getting mobilized all over the West, we used what we called the mosquito fleet. When I was a ranger at Springerville, and I was operations section chief, the ranger at Reserve, New Mexico, was the other operations section chief. And we generally would fly in the same aircraft. We were only about sixty miles from each other. And you'd get a little twin-engine aircraft and you'd fly to Boise, Idaho. It would take all night to get there, and all that. And you'd have aircraft all over Arizona and New Mexico, and we would all meet in Boise or Missoula or wherever the heck we were going, at a certain time the next morning. That really became an issue safety-wise. It isn't a smart thing to have twenty aircraft flying half the night, with all these people. So we stopped doing that. We fly commercially a lot.

What we mostly do, though, is contract with an airline company for an aircraft. Boise now owns the 727 that we jet crews around in, and it'll handle five crews. It'll handle a hundred people plus miscellaneous overhead. And they use that a lot. Used to have two jets before, but they were really expensive. But what happens now, with all the fire in the Northwest and so on, they contract with aircraft companies for aircraft. One of them is called Pacific something. They'll always have extra aircraft here or there, and a lot of this stuff. And especially they know—fire season happens every year, so they have so much aircraft and you contract with them. I have no idea how much it costs. But they'll pick up five crews in Savannah, Georgia, and haul them to Washington; and pick up five crews there that have already been there two weeks or whatever. And he'd go home and fly into Phoenix and drop them off and pick up five more crews and haul them to Boise, Idaho. That's how all this goes all the time.

What happened last year, there was so much, and all the aircraft were contracted. Well, a lot of teams from this part of the country drove in individuals' vehicles, which is a safety problem and so on. But everybody goes a different way. Aircraft crews fly, obviously, helicopters and so on. Hotshot crews have their own buggies, and they would just as soon drive everywhere. What they'll normally do, if they're going to a southern California fire, (unclear), and they don't want them two days from now—they want them now, we will fly them to L.A. or Orange County or wherever they're going to. And then we will get some local people and drive their hotshot buggies over there. Their buggies, they've got all their equipment in it, all that other stuff, but all self-contained—that sort of thing. If they're not in that much of a hurry, they'll drive. In fact, I think all the hotshot crews that are out right now drove there. There are hotshot crews in Wyoming and some in Washington, some in Utah, some in Idaho. They'll go up there, they'll spend two or three weeks and come back home for a minimum of two days off. And then they'll get reassigned to wherever the new problems are, go back out.

So there are all kinds of different ways of traveling. Commercial, that's real easy, if you're only doing five or six people at a time. The problem is, commercial, "Hey, can you get twenty seats tomorrow morning on the first flight out of Phoenix to Salt Lake City?" Generally, the answer is no, and we can't get seats that quick. So that's why you have to go contract. They use that [Vultee?] jet a lot.

Garcia Hunt: And also, dealing with the aircraft now is like—Missoula, for instance, smoke jumpers. Do they own their own aircraft too, or are those contract?

Denton: There are both the Forest Service.... I'm not so sure about the BLM, but the Forest Service does own some smoke jumper aircraft, and then there are also some contract aircraft.

Garcia Hunt: Is this Montana and Silver City, New Mexico?

Denton: Okay, the smoke jumpers that come out of Silver City, come out of Missoula. That's an agreement that this region of the Forest Service has with Region I in Montana, is that they will pay a minimum of twelve, and I think up to twenty-four smoke jumpers out of that Missoula unit, and put down here for, I think it's a five-week period. I can't remember just exactly how they come out of Missoula. And when we're all finished with them here, they go back to Missoula and work out of Missoula. But it's good for them, because their fire season hasn't started yet. Their fire season doesn't start until this time of the year. And by that time, our fire season is over in this part of the world. So there, everything gets moved—helicopters, aircraft, all. And it's set up that way on the contract. A lot of our contracts are tied in with contracts up north, because they stay there for a certain amount of time, and as soon as that time comes, they move everything up north. It's a good way of doing it. It's good for the contractor, because they get longer contracts. And it's good for the government, because the longer the contract, the cheaper the price.

Garcia Hunt: So skipping over to congressional point of view, what type of promotion for more funding do you…?

Denton: Well, I can tell you something that's happened recently, and it was actually already a little bit into effect before the big fire year of last year. When I went into Albuquerque.... Well, let me back up a little bit. The present system for fire, initial attack fire, in the Forest Service is called NIFTA. And actually, all the federal agencies, I think that's what it stands for. But anyway, it's a system based on how many fires you have, how big they get, how many acres you have, and all that stuff. And it comes down with after you've analyzed all that, it tells you how many fire engines you should have, whether you should have a helicopter or not, and the timeframes you should have in place. And it's an initial attack model. How many people you should have.

As part of that, it says that you need three engines on the Peaks District in Flagstaff—I'm just using....[an example]. What NIFTA also says is the supervisor, that the crew leader guiding them, and he's an operator, has to be a certain grade level, and should be permanent, full-time. And what they're trying to do when they say something like that is, hey, you want a highly skilled, highly trained person in charge of that engine crew. And then the assistant foreman should be a certain grade level, and maybe they should have an appointment of thirteen and thirteen, at a minimum. Again, the regular crew members can be seasonal. And it does that for hotshot crews. It says that the superintendent for the hotshot crew has to be permanent, full-time, a GS-9 rating. The foreman of the crew needs to be a GS-7, permanent, full-time. The two squad bosses need to be 13-13 appointments, a GS-6, all that (unclear).

Over time, because of budget claims, people started—and I did the same thing, when I was ranger—when you don't have enough money every year to finance everybody, instead of when your engine foreman leaves, or your assistant foreman leaves, you just don't fill the position. You fill it with seasonals, because it's cheaper to pay a seasonal than it is to pay somebody on a 13-13. What you end up getting into, over time, as budgets get shorter, because you don't fill this position, then you don't fill this one—pretty soon you have no cadre to pull from for your higher-level people. And you may have seen some things on TV or in the newspaper where everybody's saying, "Hey, we can't get enough firefighters." What they're talking about is, we can get a lot of firefighters. What we don't have is people trained and skilled and doing the engine foreman work, or the assistant foreman work, or enough to be squad bosses for hotshot crews. It's those positions that they're hurting for, because it's kind of cutting off our nose in spite of our face. In order to save money, we didn't train people right, so guess what we ended up with here?

That's just a natural reaction. That happened all over the United States in all agencies, because even though we had these rules, these guidelines that said we need to have all these people, we never had the money to do that. The agencies were never given the money. So when I went to the regional office, the first thing that happened was when we had the severe fire year, you start getting calls from congressional members, from their staffers, saying, "Hey, congressman wants to know what he can do to help the situation." In a bad fire year, there's a thing called severity, and all you have to do is show you have a severe condition over and above the normal, and you get money. It's one of the easiest things to do, being the budget staff in the federal government, probably is to get fire severity money, because it doesn't take much to show that you're in a bad fire year.

So you put down a request, and you get the money for extra engines to bring over, or extra helicopters, or an extra air tanker, or work people longer, or whatever you think is necessary to handle the situation. And that's something we tried to tell the congressmen, "You've already got a system set for a bad year. What we need is a balancing of the money during the other years, to where if your budget's down here, and we need to be up here, to have all these [foremen set in place. We need to bring Florida to where at least we'll be doing the minimum of what we said we were going to do in the NITMA plan. I spent a big time of my time asking Albuquerque, especially during the fire season, explaining to the congressional people. That's the problem—it's not the bad fire years that's the problem, it's all the other years, to where when you do have a fire year, instead of having to go from here to up here, you only have to go from here to up here, and it's easy - you have your people trained and all that other stuff.

We started working, before Los Alamos and everything else, is we made a quick study and it showed within Arizona and New Mexico, we were 124 people short of meeting this minimum NITMA stuff. So we made a proposal with the Washington office to be a pilot region to say, "To hell with the money, we're going to hire the people." And they said, "Go ahead and do that." We were already in that process when Cerro Grande took off and everything, and I'll tell you, that made it easy. Well, then, what happened after that, of course, in Montana and all, everybody else caught on, and that's where you hear now that all of these 4,000 people were hired. It wasn't 4,000. I don't know whatever it was—2,000 nationwide. Those aren't 2,000 new people. Those are 2,000 people that were converted from seasonal into these jobs. And it makes it sound like we've got 2,000 more firefighters than we've ever had before. That's only on paper it shows that. We still had those 2,000, but they were over here as seasonals, and now we've converted them to where they now have appointments.

Now, everybody in this region is up to at least a minimum level of staffing in all those jobs. And we need to keep that level, and that's what we keep telling Congress. This is not a two-year problem. We just now hired all those people on a thirty-year contract. We've got to keep that. We have to maintain that. Obviously, when you drop in levels, then you've got a problem. Not you don't have enough money to pay salary, if it drops. Congressional ways of doing business, boy, it was like that. Generally, any program that you start is pretty good for two years. But after two years, for example, if you go into a spell to where you don't have a whole lot of fires, and it doesn't get a whole lot of congressional attention, you start losing money. Why? Because it's just not in their vote. They're wanting to put on power company stuff in California, because of the energy crunch and all that. And that's the name of the game. So it really takes a lot of politicking, or whatever you want to call it, to make sure that your budget stays up there. That's why everybody's got the minimum level. It's going to take a lot of work to maintain it. A lot of work to maintain it.

Garcia Hunt: How will most critical areas in need of fire application be identified in your (inaudible)?

Denton: In the Southwest there are two areas. First, we have grasslands, we have a lot of desert country. We have pinyon-juniper woodland. And they're all, in their own way, at risk with fire. Some of the systems had fires naturally in prehistory, and some of them didn't. For example, they're finding that now. There were very few fires in the Sonoran desert. We have a lot of them now. But because of grazing and so on, we've converted some of that, and we now have a lot of brush species that are really plentiful that never had been in this territory before. That is a problem. And if you tell the people, two-thirds of the population of this state live in Maricopa County, they'll tell you that that's the biggest problem there is in the state, because all of that interface, where they're building out into the desert is now at risk from those type of fires.

But up here on the Colorado Plateau, there are two kinds that we need to be concerned about. Most of it, the biggest one, is ponderosa pine ecosystem. And really the ponderosa pine ecosystem came through evolutionary time through the last 8,000-10,000 years. There are more lightning fires in Arizona-New Mexico than any other place in the United States. There are lots of natural fires, and then the Native Americans, over the last same amount of time, 8,000-10,000 years, have applied fire within those ecosystems. And it's not just here they've done it. It was all across the United States, but particularly in this part of the world. Ponderosa pine became adapted to fire as part of the ecosystem, when fires were frequent, anywhere from two to six years in ponderosa pine, a fire went across. So what it did was keep all the grass, and it kept all the trees down. And then what happened was, is we had small clumps of large pines here, and then open meadows, and a clump over here, and then an open meadow and clumps. And that's the way it was all across the Colorado Plateau in general. And it was maintained that way by fire.

When the people came here in the 1870s and they brought sheep and cattle—and I'm not talking like thousands, I'm talking like millions—they took out all the grass, which grass was the fire carrier. They took out all the grass, and then that reduced the competition that the trees had. They could now grow up in the meadows where the fires used to burn up. They now grew up, and we have a forest here that never, in evolutionary time, was it ever like this before. And we've created that, unintentionally, in the last 125 years. Fire now, instead of helping the ecosystem along, it's now a threat to everything in the ecosystem, including us.

The mixed conifer type, which is the other type on the Colorado Plateau, is a little bit different. But the fire return in mixed conifer in this part of the country was probably twenty to twenty-five years. But we haven't had large fires in that in the last 125 years either. So those have grown up and have a lot more fuel and are a lot more of a threat than they ever had been before. We had a lot of crown fires in the evolutionary past in mixed conifers, but they were small, and they blew holes. I say small—maybe an acre here, maybe ten acres over here, maybe even be 300 acres in a really droughty year. And that's what created all the aspen stands. All the aspen stands that you see on the Peaks right now were created from fires maybe 100 or 120 years ago.

And that still happens. The problem we have now, though, instead of a ten-acre of mixed conifer fire, you get a 5,000-acre mixed conifer fire. And it gets to the point that it's beyond control. That's what ponderosa pine is. And what we're trying to do at the Ecological Restoration Institute is help people understand how it was, how it came through evolutionary time. And they're doing research on how do we get it back to that, based on, of course, different land management objectives. We can't put everything back, or maybe even some percentage back into what it was 125 years ago, because we now have a few million more human beings around that are dependent on those forests, than there was 125 years ago. And we now have certain needs of products from the national forests that didn't exist 125 years ago.

We now have also wildlife species that have become dependent on these type of forests, instead of the wide-open forests that we had. So it's a juggling act on planning on how much do you cut back. But one thing is for sure, they're all a threat right now, if we don't do some mechanical thinning and some burning, we're going to lose it to wildfire. And this isn't going to be solved in one year or three years or five years or ten years. It's going to take decades, decades, because we have millions of acres in the West that are like this. It's not just a few thousand acres around Flagstaff or whatever—it's everywhere. I was down on the Mogollon Rim the other day, south of Winslow, and on Blue Ridge Ranger District…holy smoke. I mean, that's just a catastrophe waiting to happen, on some windy day, where it's going to take all that stuff.

Intense fires in ponderosa pine are a real problem. You can live with some small intense fires in mixed conifer, because a lot of times, as long as it's not too big, you get aspen back and it starts the system all over again. But in ponderosa pine, when you have an intense fire, it's decades, decades before you get any positive response. And that's a real problem. And now we have people scattered out all over—not just in homes, but we have recreationists, hunters, everybody else that's out using the woods. We've got a lot of people threatened, not just the woods. And when we talk about communities at risk, it's not just a community of houses, it's what makes the community. It's the local product, whether people are thinning or they're pulping it or they're logging or whatever, they're raspberry picking, they're trails. It's all those things make up a community that's at risk of fire. It's not just the houses. So it's not just the last 200 feet or the last half mile up to the houses, it's the whole general area around there that's at risk.

Garcia Hunt: You kind of dabbled a little bit into wildlife. What projects do you have going with that?

Denton: Right now, we're helping them, helping the Forest Service, the Grand Canyon Forest Partnership, of which ERI is one of the partners is helping design a project, Kachina Village-Mountainaire, a large community that's like that. And those communities are at serious risk of a wildfire. Again, we look at what you need to do to reduce the fire situation, where if you do have a wildfire in that area you can handle it. But at the same time, you have a lot of wildlife in there that require a lot more dense cover than what you would like to see done strictly from a fire standpoint. Squirrels, for example, require a lot of small dense clumps. Elk require some normal cover and some hunting cover. Bears do the same thing. And deer also. They require some hunting cover, so you can't just really clean everything out. Again, it's one of those juggling acts you've got to figure out. You need to protect the community as best we can, but provide for the wildlife at the same time. And we have guidelines that require dense stands, those sorts of things. So when you have those in there, we're required by law, of course, to maintain some dense stands. So it's a juggling act. The more dense stands you have, the more of them, and the bigger they are, and the denser they are, the bigger threat they are from wildfire, from drought problems, from insects and disease.

A situation with that, I just read in the paper this morning, Mount Graham, which you probably know, there's a red squirrel population down there that is a rare and endangered species, and they have the observatories up on top of the mountain, and they have had a lot of regulations in there since then. A lot of those trees couldn't be cut, because the squirrels require dense stands. Well, they're now losing a lot of the spruce to the spruce bark beetle. And they're losing a lot to the spruce bark beetle because the stands aren't healthy. And they're going to lose a whole bunch. You have to do something to go in there to give the.... The forest never wanted to grow that intensive, because we haven't had fire in there for a long time. It is thicker now than it ever was, and all the fuel.... All those stands are now—either wildfire's going to get them, or bugs are going to get them, or disease is going to get them, or they're going to drought out, or a combination of all those. That's what we're trying to convince a lot of the environmental groups who want to do nothing. You can't do nothing. We've got to do something to save what's left. In order to save 1,000 trees, you may have to cut 400. That's the way it is.

Garcia Hunt: For the last question—unless you want to take a break. You're fine? (no audible response) What tools other than prescribed fire do federal agencies have to reduce fuel hazards?

Denton: Most of them are mechanical. There are various ways. What we have to do is get rid of the trees, and you have to get rid of the fuel on the ground. So you have live fuel and you have dead fuel. We can thin it mechanically with chain saws and those sorts of things. And there's all kinds of logging equipment for mechanical equipment on big pieces of machinery that'll come and thin for you. But basically, some sort of mechanical thinning, getting rid of, thinning the live fuel out, or certain species of the live fuel, however you want to do that, to reduce the density of the crown. Then, you also have to do something with the dead material on the ground. If you have small projects like around towns, that the city of Flagstaff's doing, or I'm sure you've seen where they clear out power lines and so on, they have chippers. That works very well, as long as there's a place to take the chips to. You can't leave the chips in the woods. Number one, they....

[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE B]

Denton: Fire can be used for two things. Number one, we need fire to put the ecosystem back to where it needs to be. And then you need to have fire to maintain the ecosystem the way you want it. The problem with fire, it's economically, it's probably the only economical thing when you're dealing with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of acres. The problem with fire is two things: number one, as with Cerro Grande thinning or the Flagstaff thinning, it's risky business. When you're dealing with Mother Nature, Mother Nature backlashed every time. That happens. But you can have the best laid plans, all those things, but when the wind changes unexpectedly—and it does—I mean, you can have it planned - When it changes unexpectedly, you're in a world of hurt, if it will cross your line, as it did in Cerro Grande, and it did with the firefighters who were unfortunately killed here the first part of the week in Washington. When it's unexpected like that, you're going to have some disasters. So I mean, you're going to get burnt by your fire.

The other thing is with fire, it's very imprecise. When you're mechanically thinning, you can say, "I want to leave that tree, cut this one, this one, this one, leave that one, and cut this one, this one." Fire doesn't do that. And you can kind of see, well, if I have a fire of this intensity with this temperature, this relative humidity, and this wind, it'll take out all of these trees and leave these. Well, that's in a plan, but at two o'clock in the afternoon when that fire happens to get to that little spot, it may not be exactly that way, so you end up maybe losing some of the trees, or all the trees that you wanted to keep. And it may not even burn the ones you wanted. So it's very imprecise, but it's what we have. You can't minutely manage every acre of a national forest when you're dealing with millions of acres. It's just there isn't enough money in the treasury or time to get things done. As I said, we're decades behind. We have got to do projects on a landscape scale basis. It's going to be risky, but it's the only way that I know of to get it done, because we're going to continue to lose hundreds of thousands of acres to wildfire every year, and every year we wait, it just delays it that much longer.

I looked up some data the other day. I compared some data from the last five decades of the average size of fires in Arizona and New Mexico. The average size of fires had tripled in the decade of the nineties over the acres that were lost in the eighties, seventies, sixties, and fifties. In some of those decades it's almost four times as much. And one of the decades, the seventies, I think, it's only two-and-a-half times. But from the seventies to the eighties to the nineties, we've tripled the amount of acres that we've lost. And that is with fewer fires, believe it or not. We had fewer fires in the decade of the nineties than we did of any decade, with the exception of the fifties. We burned triple the acres. And my opinion is, it's a combination of other things. Things have been building up over time. In addition to that, this was not all a secret. Some of the stuff you will read is that, we have realized that some things were not — I would not believe that. I was being taught way back in the early sixties as the value of fire and what fire meant to ponderosa pine and everything else. What was chosen at the time, because of the multiple use sustained years back to 1964 and so on, is that we were supposed to produce sustainable products from the national forests. So we did. And it was congressionally mandated, and it was funded, and everybody thought that is you go to timber sales and you do pulpwood. And then with the money that you make off of those projects—of which there were millions—we turned around and put that money back into what we called K-V funds, and did things, and other on-the-ground improvement projects on the ground. And that's the way it worked for decades. And what we were doing then, we were thinning the stands from above and from below, either with K-V.... And then we also created what we called VD [Bruckter Fogel?] funds, which went and gave us enough money to treat all the fuels that we'd created that we'd put on the ground. So as we went across the landscape, we were treating it geographic area by geographic area by timber sales.

What happened, in addition to that we had, the Snowflake Pulp Mill was constructed in 1958, and they drew up a thirty-year contract to bring out pulpwood from the national forest in Arizona to make sure that that mill had enough product to operate on. It was good for them, because they were producing a product, and we were being able to thin our stands of pulpwood-sized trees, which is basically five through nine inches. That worked out great. That contract ended, in 1988 or 1989, and we stopped pulpin'. The pulp mill was still open, but they're recycling. They went to recycling, rather than using our wood. So we lost a huge opportunity to treat anything of trees that size. And we didn't have enough money in our K-V plans—there wasn't enough money to do all that thinning. So we ended up started building large—we stopped cutting trees at that time, which of course was putting pine needles and pine cones and everything else on the ground. That created dense stands. And then, because of all the appeals and lawsuits from environmental groups with timber sales and so on in the nineties, we lost that market. In fact, you can't find—I think there's two small sawmills open in this state right now—one at Fort Apache, at Whiteriver, that FATCO still runs, and one in Nutrioso. There may be two small mills in northern New Mexico, but there are no more sawmills. We have lost the market because people went out of business, they sold their equipment and all that other stuff. Now that we want to get back in and trim some stuff, we not only don't have a market, we don't have any operators.

But it is not coincidence, in my opinion, as a forest practitioner, that the size of the fires have increased at the same time we stopped treating stands. Regardless of whether anybody liked the way it was or not, they were being treated one way or the other. There were some things that we did, the type of cuts that we were doing in the eighties that I personally thought were way too heavy. We went to overstory removal, and that was the wrong way to go, in my opinion. Up to that point in time, we were doing group selection and single tree selection in ponderosa pine, which is the way ponderosa pine grows. We had done that for decades.

And in fact, the data shows, regardless of what you may hear, the data shows—and I didn't bring it with me today—the data shows.... It's become a large-tree issue. As you know, you've heard of sixteen-inch caps and so on. And we did. We think of that large, mature, of the mature trees, the last eighty years to be cut. But we didn't go out and get rid of them all. Right around Flagstaff, you'll find very few yellow pines, but there were four sawmills operating here in the 1880s and 1890s. It was a big difference.

There are more large trees fifteen inches and above in the national forest today than there was in 1910. That's what the data shows. Even though we've cut them for the last ninety years, there are more now than there was in 1910, which shows that most of the large trees were cut. We obviously have a lot fewer large trees than we did 125 years ago. But they were cut when the railroads came through.

And you know, in order to get the railroads to put the railroads through, they were given six sections of land on each side of the railroad. They turned around and sold that to the saw timber companies, and they would cut. So we, as humans, liquidated a lot of those large trees before timber became regulated in the early 1900s, when the agencies came in. Those were gone long before then.

But since, even though we were cutting large trees since then, the 1989 data shows that there were more large trees, fifteen inches and above, than there were in 1910. And that's through management. What has happened now, it's not coincidence that the fires increased the same point in time that we stopped treating land.

Garcia Hunt: What is your perspective on mining?

Denton: On mining? Oh, gosh, I come from a mining community.

Garcia Hunt: Up on the plateau.

Denton: There are big issues now with drilling and Alaska. And I'll tell you, I'm against that. I know we're in a power crisis and all that, but there are other ways of doing that, than going whole hog and doing that. I think drilling—we are the only country, I think, in the world, that has a national park system, and wilderness systems and so on. And I think it would be a tragedy if we just caved in right now and started drilling and doing exploration. I don't think that's right. I personally believe we're not in that serious of a problem energy-wise. I think a lot of these shortages are self-made, either through the economy or whatever. But I'm not for doing that at all.

Garcia Hunt: Natural gas lines?

Denton: Yeah. I think....

Garcia Hunt: Does that give a bigger risk when a fire starts in an area?

Denton: It's funny you mention that. I went on a fire one time down in west Texas by Amarillo where they've got a lot of gas wells, and I thought, "Boy, this would be a problem." But it really wasn't, because they clear out along those wells, and it's a really efficient, safe operation. I've never been on a situation where we had a situation that was a threat like that.

Garcia Hunt: I only asked that because when we went up to the Leroux Fire, there's a natural gas line going through there, and one of the rangers there kind of like mentioned they didn't want that fire coming towards that area.

Denton: A lot of those, the problem is, they became a problem if you have a lot of dozers and you have to have a lot of equipment. Boy, you start digging dozer line, and you have buried gas lines, you can create a problem. That can be a danger.

Garcia Hunt: You mentioned Mexico. What is the relationship between fire and air quality? You mentioned a lot of smoke coming in and you went down there for some....

Denton: Air quality, two things. In a wildfire situation, there isn't a problem. There's a health problem and there's a social problem, and all those sorts of things, but there are no legal problems. With prescribed fire, you have all three of those. You have legal problems, you have health problems, and you have social problems. Wildfires, because they are a wildfire, you don't have a legal problem, so you don't have to meet legal mandates. But you still have a problem with smoke being in town every day, local people having health problems and so on, and we've been in places where it's not just a problem for the people in town, it's a problem for the firefighters when you have your camp in the bottom of drainages, that every night the smoke gets in the drainage and it doesn't lift until two o'clock in the afternoon, and you're living in that smoke, and everything else, for twenty-four hours a day. The smoke problem we have is with prescribed fires. Even though we would like to do a lot of prescribed fires, thousands of acres, we have again, the legal problem that you can meet, and you can meet health problems, although you get from legal situation to a health thing, the social thing, it becomes the hurdles you have to cross, or bigger.

The biggest problem you have with smoke are social problems, because there is no measurement for that. When the local people don't want to see smoke anymore in town, they don't want it anymore. And many years ago—I tell people this—is that smoke is like water. We all know where most of the people in the state live, in the fall, when most of the burning is done, all the drainage system in the state, from the Mogollon Rim goes to Phoenix. It either goes down this system to the Verde, or as you go across, it goes down the Black River and White River systems in the eastern part of the state, and they form the Salt River. And all that stuff goes to Phoenix. When the people in Phoenix they don't want to see smoke anymore, it restricts what we can do up here. That is a statewide problem. You can only put so much smoke in the air, and then you have health problems, again. You have the legal problems of how much smoke you can put in the air. So even though if we had all the plans done, and all the money in the world and all that stuff, you couldn't do all the prescribed burning that you wanted to, because you have all those other issues. And those are really difficult.

On a local basis, we have the same thing. The burning that was done this spring in Fort Valley, they had to make sure before they were lit that the smoke was going to go through Schultz Pass, and not into town. And we have to wait for those weather conditions. We just can't run out there. Today would be a good day to burn, but if the smoke's going to remain in the neighborhood for a couple of days, you can't do that. The other thing is, when you have a lot of highway systems, boy, you create some real traffic hazards—especially at night when the inversion sets in, and you start smoking-up highways and stuff, and you create a lot of accidents. That happens all over. So smoke, in my opinion, is probably the most binding thing in our prescribed fire program. It's not fire dollars, it's not money, it's not planning. All those are problems. The biggest one can be smoke issues.

Garcia Hunt: Tribal partners, tribal preservation programs. Do you do anything with tribal programs at all?

Denton: The only tribal programs we've dealt with were on suppression dealing with Southwest firefighter Indian crews, which is the biggest firefighter program in the United States, besides the one in Montana. I never have been involved. My district was adjacent to Fort Apache Agency, and White Mountain Tribe. We did a lot of games with them over trail systems, Mount Baldy, which is a religious site. The top of Mount Baldy is actually, the last quarter-mile is actually on the reservation. They have rules and regulations, not just for outsiders, but for tribal members also, on when they can and can't go up there. And we try to deal with them a lot, because 98 percent of the people that went up there started out on the National Forest side. And we put signs up and warn people and put it on the map not to go to the top of Mount Baldy you know how it is, people gotta go to the top. Every once in a while they get in the law enforcement program and arrest them and stuff. Phil Stegell [phonetic] used to say, "If you want any good backpacks and stuff, we've been confiscating all that stuff."

But we didn't deal with much of anything, except when they were doing a lot of timber program, and we were doing a lot, we'd do a lot of cost-sharing on road improvement because we had roads on each side of the line, that each of us needed to haul some of the products out on. But other than that, we didn't get much involved with actual programs on the reservation.

Garcia Hunt: How does that work when someone's making a road, or an agency wants to make a road, and they find a tribal site?

Denton: Ninety-nine percent of the sites on any of the projects we do—and we have archaeologists who work for the Forest Service, and we even have them, when we build a fire line on actual wildfires, we have them, in a known area where we have them, we have them before we have dozers and so on. And 99 percent of the time it's—whether you're building fire line or whether you're building roads, you're building a trail, or whatever you're building, you just—the best way to mitigate it is just move. You either move the road or move the trail, or you move it someplace you can't.... The federal highway people or state highway people get that. It's…when they design these large highways and stuff, it's hard for them to move one way or the other sometimes. So the way they mitigate them is they do archaeological digs and collect all the data, and then they cover them up. But 99 percent of the stuff is through road-building or trail-building or whatever, the best way to mitigate it is to just move it and leave it.

Garcia Hunt: How about wildland fire? For instance, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon.

Denton: You know, that's something that's kind of changed over the years too, because they used to tell us as long as we were not digging line through archaeological sites, it was not a problem for the fire to burn over. But they are now saying that it does cause a problem in a lot of sites where they have a lot of pottery and so on. And I'm not exactly sure what it is, but they're saying now that intense fire is a problem on some of those. As you know, on Mesa Verde, they've had fires—fires have been in there for thousands of years. But they always find more sites. After fire goes through they find stuff that trees have grown up in. But I think what bothered them last year, a lot of those cliff dwellings, very seldom do fires get into those riparian-type canyons and cause damage, but they were getting in there last year because of the drought, and I think the heat inside of those canyons, they were afraid was going to affect the structures themselves, because a lot of them have wood in them and stuff, and they were afraid that they were going to lose a lot of those beams, and the heat was going to affect the structures themselves. Last year was actually the first time I've ever heard anything like that. But I think more and more a lot of fires up here, like Elden and so on, fires on the top, I think typically it's not a problem. What they don't want you to do is run dozers through the sites and so on, because then it destroys all the evidence of how everything is layered.

Garcia Hunt: Thank you, Bill—I mean Charlie. I was looking at Bill Bishop's interview yesterday, and I was just trying to get a little bit of information also. So thank you, Charlie. You've been great.

Denton: Appreciate it.

[END OF INTERVIEW]