Scott Thybony Interview
| Biographical data |
[This is July 3], 2002. My name is Anne Holcomb, and we're here interviewing Scott Thybony at the Cline Library for the “Fire on the Plateau” exhibit. [Karen Underhill is also present.]
Holcomb: If you'd like to just start off and give us a general overview of your background and your career and things like that.
Thybony: My name is Scott Thybony. I work as a freelance writer, based out of Flagstaff. I've been doing that for about sixteen years. Having lived up here in fire country for a lot longer than that, I've come into contact with quite a few firefighters and fire, and have learned to have great respect for both.
Holcomb: I've actually had a chance to look at a few of your books. You do a good job evoking the natural and cultural landscapes of the American West. What role do you believe fire plays in these landscapes?
Thybony: Well, fire has shaped all of these landscapes, and it differs in different parts of the West. But these forests up here have always burned, and they need to burn, but they need to burn in the right way. One of the problems with our fire suppression policies for the last hundred years is that starting back with the Forest Service in 1910, this catastrophic fire up in Idaho and Montana, primarily, the Forest Service began to fight every fire, chase every smoke, put out and extinguish every fire. And so over the last sixty or seventy years in particular, the fuels in the forest, all the underbrush and the dead trees, have built up to where now the fire -especially in the ponderosa pine fires in the Southwest here -they tend to, when they do start in dry years like we're having this summer, they tend to burn quickly up into the crowns of the ponderosa, which is very destructive for ponderosa forests, and sweeps through there and can be destructive. It could wipe out stands of old ponderosa that'll take three centuries to replace.
Holcomb: Do you know anything about how historically, for the people around here, fire has fit into their lives?
Thybony: Well, Tom Swetnam is the director of the Tree Ring Lab down in Tucson. Some time ago he did a study of tree rings in the Flagstaff area, just to learn the fire history. And just south of town here, he discovered that there is a cycle, a pre-settlement pattern, before the first European settlers arrived in, say, the 1880s. Fires would go through the forests every three to seven years. But once you started bringing in livestock, sheep and cattle, they would eat the grass. And so there where no light fuels there to take this fire and spread it along the ground, that would clean out the brush and the other grasses.
The early accounts of the forest, they describe it as this open park land among the trees. Most of the early pioneers in the area talked about being able to drive wagons through the forest. And that came about because of these light fires that would burn through the ground floor of the forest. The old mature trees have this thick bark which resists heat. It insulates the old trees from the heat of a forest fire, of a light fire. And also the way they grow, the bottom branches tend to die off, so if you don't have lots of underbrush, it's difficult for a light fire to climb that ladder of fuels up into the crown.
But once we started bringing in the livestock and then suppressing fires, then you started having these dog-hair thickets that would grow, and major fires would sweep through the forest, like we're seeing with more and more frequency.
Holcomb: Do you know, what about other environments around here, like the piñon-juniper -how does fire behave in those? Or like the Grand Canyon, or something like that.
Thybony: Okay, the piñon-juniper, I used to live out in Indian Flat, north of the Peaks on an old homestead out there. It's right on the edge of the ponderosa in the p-j. The forest rangers always used to tell us that the piñon-juniper, the trees are so widely spread, that you don't have to worry about a fire there. We once had a forest fire that started about a mile, a mile-and-a-half from where we lived, and my wife Sandy, and our son, Erik, who was about six or seven, they were driving home and saw this big plume of smoke, and they got worried, they wanted to check it out to see how dangerous it might be. So they drove in with a little VW bug, back on the dirt roads, and they got in this fire, and the wind shifted, and so the smoke obscured the roads.
She was afraid of running out of gas, she was getting kind of low on gas. She drove around on those back roads, trying to find the back way into our house, but couldn't because of the smoke. The trees were flaring off right next to the road, and the grasses were burning right up to this dirt road. She was frightened. Eventually, the only way she could find her way back to our house was to retrace her route in. So she had to go back through all this fire again, and made it through okay.
As soon as I found out about the fire, I contacted the Forest Service. This was probably in the early 1980s, and the forest rangers, the person I talked to on the phone initially said, "Your house is on private land and that's your responsibility. We won't send a crew out there to fight it." Which I learned wasn't really their policy. But eventually, after threatening to call in the Navajos from the Espil Ranch -they'd recently bought that -the Forest Service did send out a team there to check out the fire. And they said, "Well, it's going to burn itself out, and you guys don't have to worry. As soon as it gets into the piñon-juniper, it will just lie down and die out." And they were right. Under those conditions, they were right, that's what happened.
But in drier conditions like we've been having in the past five or six, seven years, fires, when they reach a certain level of intensity, it's not fuel driven, it doesn't matter what the fuels are, they tend to create their own momentum, their own energy and their own weather, and they'll just sweep right through the piñon-juniper.
Back when we were living out there, too, one time there was a lightning strike on a mountain across from the house, so I grabbed a shovel and an axe, and there was a burning juniper tree, and so I climbed up on there to put it out. But the tree was just flaring off, torching off, but it seemed no danger. There wasn't much wind, and there was no ground cover, and so I just cleared out a few little branches underneath it, and just sort of stood there and watched it, and it eventually just burned itself out. And that's the way the fire would normally happen in the piñon-juniper. But with conditions now changing, sometimes you can have these major fires that sometimes begin in the piñon-juniper and sweep into the ponderosa.
This Rodeo Fire that is still burning to the south of us, it was set by an Apache firefighter, a man named Leonard Gregg, who was trying to get some fire pay. And he set his fire right in the grasses at the mouth of a canyon. Being a firefighter, he knew that that would take off and sweep up the canyon. So most of the early stages of that fire burned through the piñon-juniper. That whole Mogollon Rim area, the south exposures there, most of that's piñon-juniper. So it wasn't until it got up onto the rim that it caught into the stands of ponderosa.
Holcomb: Can you describe how -I've heard that fire goes faster when it goes uphill -can you describe how it acts in a canyon, how it behaves in a canyon, what makes that so extreme?
Thybony: Partly, the reason that it burns uphill is that the heat rises. The convection currents, the winds, the thermals, tend to go uphill. But also, the flames will pre-heat, because you're on a slope, that heat from the fire will super-heat the trees above it, and so they get dried out quickly and they reach a certain threshold and then just explode into flames. In the night time, that type of wind tends to die down, so the danger of it spreading up a mountainside or canyon isn't as great.
Holcomb: Can you describe if you've had any up-close experiences with fire?
Thybony: The only time I've officially fought a fire was I worked as a river ranger in the Grand Canyon in 1976, and the very last trip I did, I discovered a fire burning inside a cave in the Grand Canyon. This is Rampart Cave, which is down near Lake Mead, or above the backup from Lake Mead, right on the edge of the Grand Wash Cliffs. And this scientifically was a tremendously important site. It had deposits five feet deep of Shasta ground sloth dung. And you probably wouldn't think that would be that important if that burned up, but the scientists had been studying that since the 1930s, and Paul Martin at the University of Arizona, in particular, for him this was like a major museum, a major archive catching fire.
From the dung deposits, which covered a span of from about 40,000 years ago up until about 11,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene, they were able to study what the animals had eaten, and then determine the paleoclimates, environments, of those days. There are only about ten of these caves that were known worldwide that had deposits like this, and this was the best-preserved and had the deepest deposits.
And what had happened, we later figured out, putting the clues together, when the cave was discovered in the 1930s, they put an iron gate at the entrance to prevent people from going in there. But somebody had pried the bars apart, and had squeezed in with a torch. Probably just boaters that had come up from the lake. And when we got to the back of this cave, we found an abandoned torch. Maybe they blew the torch out, or for whatever reason, they threw it down on the floor of this cave, and it caught fire, just the embers from that torch caught the deposits on fire.
By the time we found it, it was filled with smoke, and I ended up fighting that fire for nine days, and it was like nine days in Dante's Inferno. To go in there you'd have to put on these (Scott? ac?) packs. These are bottles of air. And initially we could only see six inches in front of us, the smoke was so thick. The temperatures in there would get up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, so you could only work in there for about ten minutes, which was about just enough time to get back and look at the fire, the burning section, and come back out again, before you succumbed to heat exhaustion. We finally got a vent hose in there with a generator set up, and helicopters were flying in water, and we had hoses.
The strategy to fight the fire, in order to try to save the deposits, was to try to put it out lightly, just to sprinkle it and slowly cool it down. I thought what we should have done from the start was to go in there with all the resources, and just dump as much water on it as we could, just to get it out. But they were afraid that that would also destroy some of the deposits. So we went in there very slowly, over a period of days, cooling it down. By the ninth day, it was on the verge of being declared out. We figured we had a few more hours in there.
And what had happened, when I flew in there the last day, I went in with another firefighter, and the vent hoses weren't working, there was some malfunction, and we didn't know what it was. Even though we'd been told by the fire boss not to go in until everybody arrived on the scene, we were anxious to get this wrapped up, and so we went back in the cave, and the cave had heated up so much over that nine-day period, that the limestone walls had expanded, and once it cooled down, they began to contract, and so big slabs of stone had begun to fall off the ceiling and the walls of the cave. And one big chunk had crushed the vent hose.
So as we were inspecting that, the guy in front of me was bent over, looking at that rock, and of course we had these masks on and we're still breathing the air. I happened to look up, and right above him was this spall about the size of a Volkswagen that was about ready to come off the ceiling, so I just tapped him on the back and pointed up there, and he didn't say a word. His eyes got big, and he just pushed past me and made a beeline to the entrance.
When the fire boss arrived on the scene, we told him the situation, and he ordered us to stay out of the cave. The next day, we brought in the mine inspectors. I led them back in the cave, and we went in no more than thirty feet before they saw some minor cracking in the rock, and they just shut it down and ordered everybody out of there.
Eventually, after that, they brought in carpenters that tried to build a bulkhead, tried to close off the entrance to the cave, but that limestone was so porous, that it continued to smolder in there, and it burned probably for about a year, just smoldered. Eventually, they thought that they lost maybe 94 percent of the deposits when it finally went out. But fairly recently, Jim Mead here at the university, has gone back in there with a crew and done some studies, and they discovered that there's a lot more of the deposit that was saved than they initially thought. So they're still continuing to study the ground sloth dung at Rampart Cave.
Holcomb: That's good. I think that's the most unique fire I ever heard about.
Thybony: The fire was so unique, I didn't even bother to put it in this book I just wrote on wildfire. I wrote the book in third person because it wasn't a story about me, it was about the nature of fire, and how we fight fires. I worked into it stories of true firefighters. When I did research on the book, I spent some time up in Idaho at the National Interagency Fire Center. [I] talked to all the top managers up there, and these guys had all been firefighters at one time or another, but now they're in these positions of authority, and they were interested in talking about policy. I spent a couple of days doing that, and I needed to have that as a background for the book.
I was real anxious, too, to get good fire stories. My brother had been a smokejumper up in Boise, and he had told me years ago if I ever had a chance to talk to Bobby Montoya, who was the jump boss who had trained him, I should talk to this guy, he's full of stories. And so I looked up Montoya, and he was still in town. He's a legend among smokejumpers. He had jumped for twenty years, and he's now retired, does other work. But that afternoon, after he got off work, we met in the local smokejumper bar and walked in there. The aircraft mechanics in the corner shouted out his name, and the waitress gave him a thin smile, and these young smokejumpers at one table kind of stopped their conversation to watch him take his seat. Tthe first thing he told me was he said he had a thousand stories of jumps and fires, "But falling out of an airplane isn't important," he said. "What's important is them, the smokejumpers and their wives and their girlfriends and their parents and their children." So it turns out that Bobby is involved, he's kept touch over the years with lots of these smokejumpers, and anytime there's a funeral, he's there in attendance.
As we talked for a few hours, he eventually told me plenty of stories about fires. He grew up in Silver City, New Mexico, and he said he used to, as a kid, watch these planes fly over his mother's house. He always knew it was smokejumpers, because they didn't have a door on the side of the plane. His dream was to one day become a smokejumper. And then he said, "Be careful what you wish for," because he said a couple of years later he was flying over his mother's house, and he remembers being up there in the doorway, looking down, and wishing he was down there with her, because they were on the way to fight a fire, and he was scared. They were going to jump a fire. And the fires in that Gila National Forest around there have always had a reputation of being dangerous to fight.
He said when he trained as a smokejumper, the Neds, the young, new smokejumpers, before they go on their first jump, they do this mock funeral -you know, the old veteran smokejumpers will put on this mock funeral for these guys. Then they send them up on their first jump. He said his very first jump, his parachute didn't open, and he had to pull his reserve, and luckily that deployed. But he was rattled when he got to the ground, and he didn't follow the proper procedure. You know, they're trained to fold up their parachutes in a certain way.
He said when the lead smokejumper got there, and found that he hadn't followed proper procedure, he immediately made him get on the ground and start doing pushups, and then fined him a certain amount of money for the party fund, which is probably the best thing he could have done, to just kind of take his mind off his near fatality and get him back down to earth again.
At one time during the conversation, he made a statement which is sort of interesting to hear, I thought. He asked me if I wanted to know what he found to be the most ... dramatic.... Oh, how'd he phrase it? I'll think of that story later.
At one time, he was dropped on a fire, and normally the smokejumpers are the initial attack, they go in remote areas that you can't drive to. They'll fly in there. Especially in a dry season, they want to put these fires out very quickly, before they spread. Often you'll have a lightning strike that strikes a snag and the tree will be burning sometimes at it's top, and often lightning will go down and just start the fire, the ground, the duff, on fire below it.
So they jumped into this one fire and they found this burning snag, which was 140 feet tall. It was just this magnificent old tree. He was told to fell the tree, which is standard procedure, 'cause it's difficult to fight them if they're standing. So they take a chain saw, and they'll cut the tree down, and then they'll buck it up, and then they'll put it out that way. This was such a grand old tree that he just couldn't bring himself to do it. So he ignored his orders and he took his tree-climbers, and he climbed up into the tree. He said he spent seven hours, hauling up buckets of water just to put out this fire at the top of it. He said that tree is still there, and he's as proud of having done that, as having fought on all these major fires over his career as a smokejumper.
He said that he probably had -oh, I can't remember if it's twenty-four bones or twenty-seven bones -but he had broken that many bones during his smoke-jumping career. And he finally, they forced him to retire because of all of his injuries. To sum it up, as we were leaving, I said, "Well, do you miss smoke jumping?" He said, "Yeah, when we were in our twenties we were in it for the adventure. We were all Amelia Earharts. There were fifteen of us up there, and we were undefeated, fire was the enemy. I've seen it come back on. These forests have always burned, they're meant to burn. Yes, I miss smokejumping -I miss it like my own heart beating." That's the way he put it.
Holcomb: What other kinds of research did you do for your book?
Thybony: Well, I wanted to get some of the fire science, to get a background in that. So there was a lot of talking to the fire scientists, but also basic research into the hundreds of publications that are out there, trying to hit the classic ones and the more recent ones. In addition, I went to the firefighters, in order to be qualified to go on the fireline, to fight a fire, they have to have their red card. And there's a physical test, and there's also a written test they have to take. And for part of the research for the book, I went ahead and went through one of the courses they gave, that prepares the firefighters to take their written test. The physical test, you have to carry a pack weighing forty-five pounds, and you have to carry it three miles in under three minutes. No, wait, that's not right. Okay, forty-five pounds, a three-mile course.... What the hell is it?
Holcomb: I think it's forty-five minutes?
Thybony: Yeah, it's forty-five minutes, but I can't remember how much weight you have to carry.
Holcomb: I think it's forty-five pounds, too.
Thybony: Okay, forty-five pounds, three miles, forty-five minutes. Okay, that's it. And some people have trouble doing that. Then to take the written test also. The part of the course I went through, the refresher course for these guys, we also had to go through a practical where you had to deploy a fire shelter. They train the firefighters to deploy those in, I think it's twenty-three seconds. This is the first time I ever had a chance to use one of these. The one I was given -I don't know if they set me up or not -but it was packed in there just extremely tight, this practice shelter. And I was struggling for at least a minute-and-a-half, two minutes, trying to get this thing out. Even though it's all pretend, all practice, in the back of your mind, you're realizing that wall of fire is coming down on you, and you're supposed to have had this thing deployed in twenty-three seconds, and you're still fumbling with it a minute-and-a-half later, and you realize you're probably dead at that point.
Several years ago I did a backpacking trip with Bruce Babbitt, when he was still Secretary of Interior, and we did a trip down to Rainbow Bridge, hiking down the trail on the north side of Navajo Mountain. He has this interest in fires, and one of the first things he did when he was appointed secretary was to call in his guy who was in charge of fires, and he said, "Well, I want to be able to go out there on the fireline to show solidarity with these guys and fight fires." And the guy said, "Well, we could arrange that, but you'll have to have your red card." And Babbitt said, "Don't you know how signs your paycheck?" And he said, "That's the rules. We can't make any exceptions. You have to take the written and the physical." He said, "Well, I don't have time to attend the course." So they arranged a tutor. And so he passed the written course with no problem, but when it came to the physical part, he prides himself on being quite an outdoorsman, and so he was shocked when he didn't pass the physical. So for the next month he skipped lunches and just had his driver take him out to the fitness center at noon, and he worked out and soon passed the physical.
With politicians, you always have to wonder if they're doing this just for show, but at the Hochderffer Fire in 1996, he came out and he fought on that fire. I talked to the guy that was in charge of his crew, the fire boss out there, and this guy said, "No, he put in a full fourteen hours fighting this fire. He was in there with these guys, shovel for shovel, just like the rest of them. On these fires, he would usually set aside a half-hour every day to talk to the media, but the rest of the time he'd actually get out there and fight these fires.
At the same time he was on the fireline out there, I used to live north of the Peaks on Indian Flat in this old homestead, and I'd sold the place to a friend of mine a couple of years before -John Farella -and when the fire was moving toward it, I went out to give him a hand. We were clearing away brush, moving any flammable material away from the houses out there. We got up on the ridge behind the house, and you could see in the distance -well, actually, just a few hundred yards away -the fire, and the fire crews down there cutting line, and the trees flaring up, the ponderosa just torching off, and lots of smoke. But the winds at that point were taking the fire to the south of us, and we figured it'd probably miss by about a mile. And so after doing what we could, I left, and Farella stayed out there longer.
But then the wind shifted, and if you talk to firefighters they'll all tell you that basically a fire just seems like it has a mind of its own. It's so difficult to predict the fire behavior. And this fire, for some reason the winds shifted somewhat, but a finger of the fire came running around the side of the mountain, heading right towards the old homestead. He said it was frightening to watch this because the sky just got black, and these dense clouds started billowing over the homestead, and embers were falling. He evacuated. At some point before that, the forest rangers out there told him to leave, though he wanted to stay and do what he could. But he realized he would just be in the way at that point, so he left, he evacuated from that wall of fire that was coming. The firefighters themselves, though, he later went back and learned their story, because he was so impressed by what they had done. And so he wanted to go around and thank each one of them individually.
There was a structural team from Chino Valley that had a regular fire engine out there, and these guys were trained to protect houses. But they also had the Forest Service fire crew out there, and they had a pumper truck that was pulled in behind this old stone house. It had a metal roof. There were four or five guys from Chino Valley, and then this Forest Service team. One guy had fought fires quite a bit in California, and so he's used to these chaparral fires. They had a fire safety officer across the field. Beginning especially in 1994, after the thirty-four firefighters that summer died in fires, fourteen of them on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, after that they began to assign a fire safety officer to each crew. And these guys, they're with the crew, but they stay at some distance, and they don't fight the fire at all, they just watch the conditions and how they develop. And they can order those guys out of there if it looks too dangerous.
And so everybody there at the scene was not sure if they should stay or leave. They knew the conditions could grow dangerous, it's always unpredictable. And the fire safety officer left it up to the fire boss on the scene. He was wavering, he was ambivalent, but this one guy from California -I believe his name's Chris Bradley -he told Farella later that house was defensible, he knew it -stone, and there was a dirt road in front of it between the house and most of the trees. He said if they didn't try to save that, then they weren't doing their job, he didn't know what they were doing out there.
And so, having one person that was strongly in favor of staying to defend it, swayed everybody else. And so they decided they would stay. And so there's a ridge behind the house, and this is in primarily piñon-juniper. But as that wall of flame came rushing down that ridge at tremendous speed, it hit the pine trees that were close to the house -there's three or four of them -and when it hit that, there's also a gap between two mountains, and there's winds coming in from a different direction. And they believe that later, what had happened, is that when those winds hit just at that point, it flared up into a wall of flame a hundred feet high, but instead of just rushing down at the house, it flared up and then this wave of flame just broke over the house, crested over the house -over the two houses that are out there -and hit the field of rabbitbrush and grass beyond it, and continued. And that just amazed the firefighters, because they thought once the fire hit that grass, it would stop burning. It just had a head of steam built up, and just swept out across Indian Flat. So eventually, everything around that house burned, except this little island of unburned houses.
At the time, we didn't know that, so when Farella left and came into town, I talked to him just to find out what the situation was, and he was afraid, just the way it looked, that everything would have gotten overrun by the fire. But he wanted to go out there and check it, he wanted to see what had happened. So later that night, once the winds died down, we drove out. The sheriff had blocked all of the roads out there, which they do in situations like that. But we knew the back roads pretty well, so we found our way, coming down from the north, and we could get pretty close to the area. As we approached it, we could see where the fire had stopped. All those hills, those cinder cones around the ranch at Indian Flat had burned. We could see flickers of flames still glowing on the hillsides. Once we left the truck and began to walk in there on foot, we saw that the whole field out there was black, and the whole flats, where it had burned, they were black. And the trees, it was dead still out there, too, there was no wind.
We couldn't hear any of the firefighters, it looked like everybody had pulled out. So we thought what had happened was that the fire just got so intense that these guys decided just to abandon it and to leave. And so we were expecting to find everything burned over. There's one hillside that was burned, it looked just like the stars in the sky at night, just these little pin pricks of burning trees and vegetation. Some of the trees, as we walked, we were passing trees that were just burning from the inside out, and occasionally little flare-ups. Then we started hearing.... The only sound out there we heard was this one bird cry. But then we started to hear a sound that sounded like somebody chopping on a log with an axe. So we figured, "Well, the firefighters must still be out here." And we stopped and listened, realizing it was just the popping of pitch inside one of these burning trees.
And so we walked, it was just this eerie -the firefighters call it moonscape -where you have a ground that had been burned over, and it looked liked those photos of World War I, Verdun, 1916, where everything has just been blasted, a few of these burnt trees, bare limbs, on this lunar landscape. And so we walked along. The closer we got to the ranch out there, the more we feared that we were going to find just a pile of ashes. When we got out there, we found it was still standing. It was just puzzling to us. We couldn't figure what had happened there, because everything around it was burned, but yet this place had survived. There were no firefighters, but we could see their hose marks in the dust by the house, so we figured somehow these guys had made this courageous stand and saved the house. And so for me, I became really interested in the nature of fire and how it behaves, and trying to figure out how this could be, how you can have this major front of flames sweep over an area, but have one little pocket survive.
So when I was asked to write this book on fire, I jumped at the chance, 'cause it gave me the excuse then to talk to people and find out a little more about fire science, the behavior of fires.
Holcomb: Definitely. I've heard a lot about how fires can create their own weather systems. Did you look at that at all?
Thybony: Yeah. What happens in major fires, what they call the plume-dominated fires.... Well, there's two things. You have vast acreage of trees burning, so you have lots of energy being released into the atmosphere. The heat is rising up, you have this convection column of heat rising into the air. Just in the last couple of weeks here in Flagstaff, you could get up on the hills in town. We could look ninety miles to the south, and we can see that Rodeo Fire, the Chedeski Fire, smoke from it just rising up 30,000 feet in the air. What it tends to do, it tends to then, when it gets up that high, all the particulate matter -and you have moisture from what moisture that there is in the plants and trees that are burning -that tends to condense up in these high altitudes, and it forms a pyro-cumulus cloud. It actually forms its own little unique clouds. It sometimes looks like a little cap of clouds right on top of this column of smoke. And I could see that from Flagstaff just last week.
Also, what happens too, and very dangerous, is that as you have all this heat rising up in this column, sometimes covering hundreds of acres, rising up vertically, you have air that's being sucked in from all directions. So your normal winds no longer matter, no longer are dominating the fire, and it makes it extremely unpredictable, because the firefighters on the scene there, they're used to the fire blowing in from one direction. But when you start having winds coming from all directions, you just can't predict what the fire's going to do. You also have these embers spotting in front of the fire. So you have little spot fires starting in areas you may not even know about. It may be right behind you. Then all of a sudden, that wind getting sucked into the center of the fire blows those flames right over you. And they can move at tremendous speeds.
Once this system starts, the rising column of heat can collapse on itself, too, because the hot air will cool when it reaches a certain level. Sometimes that collapses, and you get this downdraft, these downbursts, these micro-bursts. And those things can just collapse onto a fire with tremendous speeds, and you have these hurricane-force winds that can uproot full-grown trees, and it just turns into a firestorm. It's particularly dangerous for the crews on the ground.
One odd thing about these major fires like that, is that most of the fatalities that happen don't occur in those situations, because everybody's on their toes. When a fire's taking a run like that, through the crowns of these trees, the firefighters pull everybody out. There's nothing they can do, it's out of their control. Every firefighter I've talked to, from the guys on the ground to the main incident commanders, they said that a crown fire under dry, windy conditions, it's outside their control. All the resources in the free world can't help. They just have to stand back and watch it in awe until it makes its run and dies down.
So they pull these crews out, and they try to work the fire from the back or the sides, and eventually try to herd the fire, try to pinch it off. But it's so dangerous, and those big fires, they tend to have more experience, the guys calling the shots. So it's rare that they have fatalities in a big fire, unless it's on an isolated section of a big fire. It's usually the smaller fires that are more unpredictable, that they have crews in there that are not paying complete attention, just sort of off the radar. And that's where you tend to have major death, major trouble.
Holcomb: That's really interesting. Do you know when is the point that the firefighters decide to withdraw? Is there a certain behavior that they look for?
Thybony: Yeah, they're trained in a drill intensively. They're given these little handbooks that tell (blank tape for a second) ten or a dozen of them, and I don't remember all of what they are. But they're trained to watch for certain conditions, and when those conditions, one or more of those are present, then it's dangerous, and that's when they have to be on guard in order to pull out of that area until the conditions change. So they're trained well, in most cases.
In some of these fatal fires, one of the criticisms sometimes is the fire crews aren't trained as well as they should be. But there's a lot of experience out there, a lot of good firefighters. The problem with fire is it tends to be inherently unpredictable and dangerous. When those guys are out there, they're risking their lives. That's another reason, these big fires, to pull them back. They just don't want to lose people just to protect a house. That makes sense.
Holcomb: Yeah. There does seem to be a tension I've seen, between the firefighters and the people whose houses are at stake, and whose properties are at stake, because they see the firefighters withdrawing and pulling back, and they don't seem to understand how severe the fire is. Like, "Why didn't they do more to save the houses?"
Thybony: Yeah, there's a lot of emotion, just being on the fringes of some of these situations where houses are at risk. When someone's home is at risk or burning up, that's when emotions flare up. We've seen in this big fire on the rim, right in the middle of the fire, everybody starts pointing fingers. Politicians are accusing environmentalists, and the environmentalists are pointing their fingers at the loggers, and then the homeowners are complaining about everybody. So, yeah, whenever there's wildfire, there's just lots of wild talk. And so you kind of have to let that simmer down and then hopefully more reasonable people will start speaking out.
It's understandable. People are losing their homes, they're losing their businesses. It's not only their houses, the physical structures that are being destroyed, but often their life's work, their careers. And there's plenty of blame to go around on all sides, including the homeowners. The Rodeo-Chedeski Fire, the biggest one so far this fire season -at least the most destructive one in Arizona history -there's some question as to whether it was the largest or not. But it's hard to say, under our current conditions, whether it could have been prevented. [We] may not have been able to prevent it, but we certainly could have prepared for it much better.
And starting at the homeowner's level, and starting right at the foundation level, people living in this country, this fire-shaped landscape, you have to build for fire, you have to landscape your home for fire, and we have to hold the developers to a higher level, to design their subdivisions for fire. And then the local governments and the state governments, everybody has their role to play. There's quite a few things that could be done, that haven't been done in the past, to at least prepare for these fires, if not prevent them.
Holcomb: You said something about the largest fire. Is there another fire that....
Thybony: I was down in Tucson last week, and talking to Tom Swetnam from the Tree Ring Labs, and he was telling me he thinks that there may have been, back in the 1880s, a fire in Arizona that was mentioned in one of the Tucson papers, and he said the description of it is a bit vague, but it sounds -if it was correct -of course, this is frontier journalism, prone to exaggeration -but if the account was correct, then it actually covered a wider square-mile area than the current fire. You should call him up, and tape him too.
Holcomb: What do you see happening in the future, with people dealing with wildfires?
Thybony: Right now there's a lot of attention focused on fires and preventing fires. That happens in every major fire, especially a disastrous fire. There's lots of talk, and sometimes there's action. The last major fire season was the summer of 2000. That's when you had the fire at Los Alamos, the Cerro Grande Fire. Swept in, threatened the nuclear labs there and burned 237 homes -destroyed 237. And right after that, there was a tremendous concern about our whole policy of prescribed fires, and should we allow them, how could we do them better. The federal government initiated studies at that point. And also, they put in like $8 million or more than that, I believe -I think $8 million of it came here to Flagstaff -to develop techniques to treat the forest, to do this forest restoration, and try to restore the forest to a level that more resembled the pre-settlement conditions of the forest.
And so there's a lot that's going on, a lot of good work and good thinking out there, but it's slow and it's very expensive. Some of these treatment (blank tape for a second) costs like $500 an acre, which is impossible. You just can't afford that for an entire forest. They have to focus on some of these areas that are closer to the towns, the wildland-urban interface.
So yeah, there's going to be a lot of talk, there'll be some action. Just from the recent talk of politicians, there's going to be a move on to allow more logging in the forest -at least more thinning of areas to try to if not prevent fires, at least to slow their spread down. So there'll probably be some action, but again, under certain conditions, given the condition of the forest right now, we're not going to prevent all of these fires. Some of them are climate-driven, and you get these extreme drought conditions and high winds, they're going to burn no matter what you do.
So I think a lot of the focus should be on how to prepare for these fires. There's not a whole lot of talk about that at the moment.
Holcomb: Do you think that in the future homeowners will be more aware of that?
Thybony: Well, they should be. The problem is, in this country you have so many people moving in from outside, and there's been a tradition of that for the last century. So people come into this country and they see these nice forested areas, may not be aware of fire. And I think it's up to the local communities and the Forest Service, and if they buy into a development, everybody has the responsibility to get the word out, so people are aware of the dangers and can do what they can to prevent it, to prevent their home from being completely destroyed.
Holcomb: Definitely. Where do you stand on the thinning debate?
Thybony: Well, I think that it's been proven from past fires that it does help. There's lots of different styles of thinning, or what they call the treating of forests. There's a protest against certain ways of doing that. Most environmental groups actually support a certain degree of thinning, especially in that wildland-urban interface. But there are environmental groups that don't believe that we should cut any trees at all, we should disengage and let nature take its course. And of course we're joined at the hip, our destiny is linked to the forest, and there's no way we can stand back. We're part of it, we're part of that ecosystem. So I think we have to do it as wisely as we can. These ecosystems are so complex, we'll never know enough to be able to accurately predict. So we just have to do the best we can, hope that the unintended consequences don't come back to haunt us -which they usually do, from the history of these things.
I think, especially in a large urban concentration like Flagstaff -and actually some of the finest cities in the West are like Flagstaff, they're right in a ponderosa pine forest. Santa Fe....
[END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]
Holcomb: Flagstaff . . .
Thybony: . . . Bend, Oregon; Missoula, Montana -these areas are at risk to being run over by a catastrophic fire. So I think in these urban areas -and this is being done to a certain extent, but it probably needs to be more money, more attention. You could probably recruit a good volunteer corps, kind of the modern version of the old bucket brigade, of people whose homes are at risk. People are dying to help.
One of the problems with just pulling out and evacuating people out of these areas, I think, people are at a distance, they get angry because there's nothing they can do, it's frustrating. They just have to watch the news reports and see their homes getting threatened or destroyed. But I think way in advance of fires, you could enlist that pool of volunteers, people that would be willing to go out and help the Forest Service thin, or even prescribe burning. You can take these volunteers, give them some basic training, get them out there to help on prescribed fires.
The Forest Service has to have crews out there at nighttime, just watching the fires, making sure they don't spread. Well, you could have volunteers from the local subdivisions there, that'd be more than willing to do that. And then during the fire itself, instead of evacuating everybody, have these people that have some training stay in the towns, and not be responsible for any of the major firefighting, but just to go around and look for spot fires, and put these little minor spot fires out.
And then afterwards, what's extremely important, once you've had a fire sweep through an area, is that you have to protect against erosion. Down there on the rim now, it's going to take two or three centuries for those forests to recover. But if the monsoons come in and wash off the topsoil, if you have a tremendous erosion there, it'll take a thousand years. So get these volunteers, again, to go back in there and help the Forest Service in preventing erosion.
So there's things like that you can do. In Flagstaff, I think what I would do -and I'm not sure exactly, I haven't looked at the fire plan that the Forest Service and the town has come up with -but to me, the most logical thing to do would be to go out, find the most defensible areas, places they would normally build a fireline during a fire. You know, like it might be a good ridge line or a canyon or a road system out just to the west, southwest, and south of town. And then you'd go out there, and just focus your efforts in those areas, as far as your treatment. And you go out there and do extensive thinning. Restore that area to the pre-settlement conditions.
And when a major fire comes through, in some conditions it'll probably still burn through those areas, but there's a likelihood that it'll drop down to the ground, and then burn along in more of a light fire. And then it might continue on the other side, but at least it slows down the fire and gives the firefighters [a chance] then to buy some time, gives them a chance to build more fireline to protect the town itself. Those are a couple of ideas.
Holcomb: Almost like a fire militia or something like that.
Thybony: Yeah, the bucket brigade.
Holcomb: What about the logging of the small-diameter pines? Have you looked at that at all, and the options?
Thybony: Just a little bit. One problem, again, is that it's expensive to do it right, to do it so that the logging doesn't impact. You know, get the heavy equipment in there that packs down the ground cover. Wally Covington, here at NAU, working with the Grand Canyon Trust and the Forest Service and other organizations, they're trying to develop ways to do that that doesn't impact the forest as much as some methods that have been used in the past.
Yeah, so there's some good thinking out there. One angle that they're trying to work on, though too, is to try to make it economically viable, because it's so expensive. If they could figure out a way that they'll get in somebody in a commercial way that will harvest these trees, that they can use these small-diameter trees and make it profitable, then it's more likely that'll get done, and it'll get done quicker than has been in the past. I know here at NAU -and I don't know all the details -but there's a program here to take, they design like an affordable hogan that might be an attraction to Navajos and others, that has all the modern conveniences, but that uses this small-diameter trees. I think they run for $30,000-$35,000, which I guess to the Navajos on the reservation may not be considered affordable, but at least people are thinking on those lines and coming out with different ideas.
Holcomb: I think that's basically all the pre-made questions that I had, so if there's anything else that you'd like to talk about, or anything like that.
Thybony: I'm trying to think if there was anything that wasn't covered.
Underhill:: Scott, could you describe for us the arraignment that you did attend concerning the intentional beginning of this last fire?
Thybony: I work occasionally as a stringer for The New York Times, and they gave me a call Sunday morning. The editor from New York was surprised that he caught me in the office on Sunday morning at eight o'clock, which is unheard of, of course, in New York. But I was working on another project, and he asked me to cover this arraignment for the accused arsonist in the Rodeo Fire down along the Mogollon Rim. That was going to be at 9:30 that morning, and it just was right across the street from my office. So it was easy to just go over there and cover it then.
The Apache firefighter, this guy Gregg -at the time they didn't even know his name. His name hadn't been released. But he had leg irons and handcuffs and he was wearing his Coconino County Jail blues, his jail garb. They brought him into the courtroom, into Judge Steven Verkamp's [phonetic] courtroom. At that time he didn't have his own lawyer, but they had appointed him a lawyer, and I believe this morning, Wednesday, he went to his preliminary hearing. But that initial hearing was just his arraignment. So they read the charges, he was charged with two counts, one for setting the smaller fire, a one-acre fire near Cibicue on the Fort Apache Reservation. And they put that out very quickly. And this guy worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, their department of forestry, as a seasonal firefighter. He'd been doing this for more than a dozen years. He needed money. He went out and set that one fire, and his crew was the first one called out.
They put out that one fire, and then he apparently went out then and set a second fire, the one they weren't able to control. It spread up the rim, into the forest, off the reservation. But he struck kitchen matches into the dry grass, one after the other, right at the mouth of this canyon, and he knew it would sweep up -or he must have known, as a firefighter, that there was a good chance this fire was going to spread into a big fire. But he essentially confessed: When the judge asked him if he had any further questions, he said, "Well, can I say that I'm sorry?" And the judge immediately cut him off there and said, "Well, this isn't the proper time to make a statement like that. Wait 'til you have your lawyer represent you." He didn't want to get this guy in any more legal trouble than he already was in.
When they released the official complaint a couple of hours later, in the complaint the investigator, in a sworn affidavit, said that -he [i.e., Gregg] admitted to him [i.e., the investigator] that he had set these fires, so he'd already confessed to having set the fires. And he's most likely to -you'll find this a lot among Navajo and Apache and other American Indians, is that when they are caught, they want to accept responsibility for what they've done. They often will confess and plead guilty right from the start, instead of trying to fight it.
Holcomb: Actually, for your book, did you look at Native American firefighters at all?
Thybony: I mentioned about some of the hotshot crews. There's some famous hotshot crews. Actually, the Apaches have one of the most highly-rated, or the hotshot crews that have the best reputation. As far as that angle of the story, I worked into it just in a very condensed form. Several years ago, there was a fire on the north side of the San Francisco Peaks, what they called the Bear Jaw Fire. It only spread maybe 300-400 acres. And what had happened, there was a missing plane, and there was a search for a downed plane. One of the search crews had gone in there, and it was a chilly night, and these guys apparently had set a warming fire and had left it, or thought they'd put it out. Anyway, that kicked up the next day and caught the north side of the Peaks on fire.
A week later, a Navajo singer, hatali -translates as "singer" in Navajo -we usually say "medicine man" -who at the time was working with the Navajo Tribe, Alfred Yazzie, he decided to come out here and do a special ceremony called a cooling-down. He referred to it as a sprinkling, or a cooling-down ceremony. It's a version of the Blessingway. It's the same ceremony they do after a hogan burns -say, is struck by lightning. They consider the Peaks to be one of the four sacred mountains. It's extremely sacred to the traditional Navajo, and so when there was a fire on the mountain, which they could see the smoke plume from the reservation, to them it was a sign of some deeper disturbance, that the natural order was out of balance, and so it needed to be -they do a cleansing ceremony to kind of restore that balance.
It's very rare that they like to have these ceremonies written about, but he thought that being in the wake of this fire, it'd be a good chance to kind of spread the word about the significance of the mountain to the Navajo people. He thought it would be a good idea to let the local people in Flagstaff know how important these mountains are to the Navajo. So he invited me and Mary Tolan, who was at that time working for the local paper, and some of the Forest Service -the Forest Service archaeologist and some of the fire managers that had been out there on that fire. They came up.
He wanted to go to the source of the fire, so we walked back a mile or so, up into Bear Jaw Canyon, to where there's a little blackened fire ring where the fire had started there. And then he performed a ceremony. Sometimes those ceremonies can go into the night, can last for days. This one lasted about an hour-and-a-half, a fairly short ceremony.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Thybony: Just out of curiosity, you're interning, but as part of what course?
Holcomb: I'm in graduate school at the University of Michigan, studying archives for a master's degree.
Thybony: I think you mentioned that in your letter.
Holcomb: This is July 3, 2002. This is Anne Holcomb, and we're on Tape 2 of Scott Thybony's interview here at the Cline Library for the Fire on the Plateau Program.
Thybony: I'll pick it up where I left off, talking about the Bear Jaw Fire, which burned on the north side of the Peaks in 1995 -I believe it was in August. I think the fire was in August. We may have been up there early September, probably late August. Alfred Yazzie, a singer, a traditional chanter, took a group of us up there to the site where the fire started. He had one of his apprentices along, and a friend of mine who was an archaeologist with the tribe, Roger Henderson. Amos Begay, an apprentice of Alfred Yazzie's, was up there also.
It was fairly unusual in that most of the ceremonies, it's very rare to be invited to these ceremonies. The ones I've gone to in the past, they're all in Navajo, so I'd be able to pick up a few words, a phrase or two. And this one was nice, because Alfred actually invited outsiders. So as he went along, he was actually explaining. Like, he would take out the basket he was using, and explain the symbolism of the design on the basket. He'd unwrap his medicine bundle and he'd actually talk about the various items in there and what they represented, and the significance of it, and how it tied-in with the Peaks. We were right there on the spot, and he was talking about this sacred mountain of the West, and explained all the various ritual items.
They have a ritual mixture that they smoke -it'll vary with different ceremonies -and this one I found real interesting to see the way that Amos prepared it, because it had some of the wild, native tobacco in it, but various herbs mixed in there. They would take a bighorn horn, and they'd do scrapings off of that to mix in with the smoke. In this case, it was wrapped in a corn husk. I asked Alfred about that, and he said that the bighorn at one time, there was evil in the world. This goes back to the time of the monsters, that's Navajo tradition. This is before the sons of Changing Woman, Monster Slayer, and Born for Water rid the world of these monsters. But these monsters were decimating the Navajo people, but also destroying many of the animals that they depended on. One of the animals that was able to survive that time was the bighorn, and that's why they use shavings from the horn as part of this mixture.
But the ceremony went on, there was number of prayers and songs, and we were sitting around in a little circle there. The standard way of praying among the Navajos is that Alfred passed his pouch, this beaded pouch, and it had corn pollen in the pouch. The pouch is made out of what they call unwounded buckskin. They need that for ceremonies. In the past, before the horse was introduced to the Navajo, they'd have to have relays that would run down a deer, and then they would smother it -when the deer was exhausted, they'd take a pouch of cornmeal and smother the deer. And then they'd take that hide and use it for their ritual leather for these pouches and other reasons. Then they would also do that on horseback, in historic times.
So he had this pouch of the unwounded buckskin, and he'd pass that around in the circle. Each person, following his lead, would take a pinch of the corn pollen. You put a little touch to your tongue, and a little bit right above your forehead, a little sprinkle to the ground, and then with a sweeping motion up to the sky -to Mother Earth and to the Sky, which is considered to be male. And so he was instructing people on how to do that, because most people there, the forest rangers, and the archaeologist, just hadn't participated in those ceremonies before.
When it got to the core of the ceremony, which is the cooling-down segment of it, he asked Linda Farnsworth, who was the Forest Service archaeologist, if she would help him be his assistant. And he kind of joked and said, "We'll make a Navajo out of you." He had these two prayer sticks, these feathered prayer sticks, and they were dipped in water. He took her hands and showed her how to hold them and how to shake them. Amos represented the male rains, the male waters; she represented the female waters. And he told her to make sure she had no bad thoughts today. So they would go around the circle of people, and she would sprinkle, being female, from the ground, up. And representing the male rains, Amos would sprinkle from the sky, down. So they make four circuits, and each circuit they would sprinkle water on the participants there. It felt like every time they'd come by, it'd feel like the summer rain, the cooling rain, just sprinkling on your face.
At the very end of the ceremony, there's a final prayer, which is pretty standard in these Blessingways. And Alfred again translated it, in a very summarized fashion, saying that it means that beauty is to go before you and behind you, and beauty is to go outside you and within you, and beauty all around you. So that brought a close to the ceremony. And as we were walking back out towards the road to the trucks, we came to an opening, and Alfred looked up at the pure blue sky -there wasn't a cloud in this blue sky. I asked Alfred, "Well, do you think it's going to rain?" All he said was, "Well, keep your fingers crossed."
He went on back to the reservation, and the next day I was in Flagstaff here, and late in the day this storm started to come in. But it was from a very unusual direction. These summer storms tend to come in -these monsoonal storms -from the south or the west-southwest. This one was coming in like from the northeast, from the direction of Bear Jaw Canyon. Big thunderheads were building up, and at first it was the male rains. The male rains are the summer thunderstorms, they come swift and violent and suddenly, and they go fast. So you have these big thunderheads build up, and this downpour happened. And then the clouds began to lower after that, they kind of eased into these soft, gentle, female rains that stayed all night long. It turns out, the center of that storm was right over there on the north side of the peaks, and it rained like two or three inches of rain right in that area. Of course I passed the word on to Alfred, and his friend had told him, "Oh, he just smiled." You know, thought it was nothing unusual.
Underhill:: Have you had any conversations with Native American friends and colleagues about what's happening now, in terms of our severe drought, and any predictions for what's to come?
Thybony: Yeah, these droughts, it depends on who you talk to. Some Navajos I've talked to say, "Yeah, this is a four-year drought." Others say it's a ten-year drought. In Flagstaff, we had a normal year last year ourselves. These droughts tend to be -they're currently a mosaic pattern. Some areas get hammered, there's just no rain at all for years. Other areas tend to get normal or even above normal years.
Even two months ago I was out in the Painted Desert area of the reservation. This Goldtooth family, that has grazing permits over a wide area there up on the Moenkopi Plateau. They had a little bit of water in some of their tanks, but no vegetation. So they were having to sell off their livestock, and lease land up in Colorado, and take the best of their livestock up, just to have a core to begin again once the rains come.
But other Navajos, anytime you have trouble like that, the traditional Navajos consider it a sign of trouble. There's nothing that happens by accident. There's a reason why this happens.
About four years ago -again, during a drought time -there were two traditional Navajo women, one a daughter in her sixties, and the mother in her nineties, out in the Hopi Partition lands, out near Big Mountain, a place called Rocky Ridge, and they lived in a hogan out there. The older woman had had a stroke two years before, and she hadn't said a word since then. She just spoke up one day, it was kind of a windy day, it'd been real dry up there, and just out of the blue she said, "They're coming." And the daughter said, "Who?" And she didn't answer. And twice more she did that. The daughter meanwhile moved her sewing machine over by the window so she could watch her driveway, her dirt road, to see who might show up.
Finally a big wind kind of passed over the hogan, and then just sort of settled down. This woman in her nineties was also blind and in a wheelchair, and she said, "They're here." So the daughter went outside, and there were two -she described them as Holy People. These were two Navajo men, dressed traditionally, and they were glowing, and one had this fine-ground cornmeal, what they use for praying, the yellow corn, just raining off of him. The other had white raining off of him. And she said she tried to walk toward them, and it was like walking against the wind, she had to bend over. And she asked who they were, and they wouldn't answer her.
They said, "We are here so that you can give this message to the Navajo people. The reason there is this drought is because they haven't been going to the mountains, and they haven't been doing their ceremonies." That implied a whole package of things that they had not been doing properly: falling away from their traditions, they hadn't been doing the proper ceremonies, making the proper offerings, they hadn't been going to the sacred mountains. And so they said, "In order to end this drought, what you have to do...." is four ceremonies. First of all they had to go visit the four sacred mountains, and then they had to perform these four ceremonies.
So when those guys left, those guys disappeared, and she immediately went out, got her mother, and drove off to Window Rock to report it to the tribal chairman. They basically shut down the reservation. They wanted no outsiders, no media to go here. They interviewed her, recording her account of this Navajo, had it translated and transcribed. And then for the next month, within a month, 50,000 Navajos had descended on this place. There's a couple of mentions of it in the local paper. Maybe it got as far as The Arizona Republic, but they weren't allowing media there, so it just wasn't covered. But it was a major event on the reservation. Everybody you ran into, that's all they could talk about. Fifty thousand Navajos were going there, leaving offerings.
The problem was, to try to break this drought, they were told to do the four ceremonies. Three of them were easy, but one was a ceremony that they thought had died out. They weren't even sure who these diyen dine' [phonetic], these holy people, were. And so all the medicine men had to gather and kind of discuss it and hash it out, try to decide "who were they, what did they want?" And as far as the fourth ceremony, they finally found one old guy who was in his nineties, he was the last guy to still practice this ceremony. And so they finally got the fourth one. And after they had visited all four of the mountains, and then done the four ceremonies, then the rains came. So they attributed that to having listened to these guys.
The more traditional Navajos see it as sometimes witchcraft, sometimes just the fact that they've fallen away from their traditions. I'm sure there's talk like that now in this current drought.
Holcomb: Actually, I thought of another question: about trying to raise fire [awareness (Tr.)] when it's on a national level, because I'm from Michigan, and I had no idea that it was this extreme out here, and the whole idea of fire suppression and things like that. Do you know of any programs that are going on to try and educate people around the nation, or even internationally? What do you think should be....
Thybony: The Forest Service and the Park Service, those guys have programs like that, and websites. But it usually takes a major fire. This season, everybody, it's on national news just about every night. It is a front [page (Tr.)] story, or often the lead story, or has been a number of times in The New York Times. So right now, the word is out. Those stories tend to fall away fairly quickly, too, and interest -especially on a national level -tends to die down when there's a new crisis. But yeah, while there is awareness like this -that's one reason why the politicians are jumping in, right in the middle of this crisis. I tend to think that the people involved, whether it's environmentalists or the victims, the people that lost their homes, they often see it as exploiting this tragedy for their political agenda, whatever it is. I tend to agree with that. I think they should try to work together, in solidarity, while the crisis is still here. And then afterwards try to hash out all these difficulties and place the blame where it goes. But the politicians, they know that the public attention span is very short. Even though you have these established programs out there, it only reaches a certain number of people, and so they use a fire like this as a springboard then to promote their political ideas, to promulgate them.
Talking about the forest in this area, one reason I tend to think of these major fires we're having as being more climate-driven than necessarily fuel-driven -although that's a major contributing factor -is that for many years, when I first started to live in the 1970s just south of the Grand Canyon, the forest between Flagstaff and the South Rim there, they used to call it the asbestos forest, and it's basically the same forest we have now, 'cause even then you had tremendous fuel loads, built-up fuels over the years, because of this fire suppression. But the fires just wouldn't catch. They'd get a lightning strike, and they might get a little smoke, or they might get a two-, three-acre fire. But they just never got any big fires there.
And one of the standard ways of attacking these fires in those days was the fire crews, these guys would get frustrated because they weren't getting their fire pay. They'd wait around for a fire, there'd finally be a lightning strike on a snag, and they'd be called out, and these guys would just drag their feet, 'cause they knew it wasn't going to spread. They'd slowly get everything loaded on the truck, and they'd drive out there. They'd go over and they'd inspect the fire, and they'd see a little smoke coming up from the base of the snag. They'd go and eat their lunch, take a nap, and then the fire crew would go over there and they'd stand around in a circle, unzip their pants, and put the fire out. That's the way they used to fight fires around here. So it's just been the last four or five years, really, that things have gotten dangerous. I think a good part of that is these drier, windier conditions we're having.
Holcomb: Do you know what causes that? The drought, it's like a periodical thing, isn't it?
Thybony: Yeah, there's lots of different ideas on it. I haven't read one convincing theory to me. I know some years ago a man was at the USGS here, Thor Karlstrom [phonetic], just a top scientist. He had published a paper on various climatic cycles that went through various oscillations. I remember he was thinking that the cooler, wetter period had peaked out about in the 1880s, 1890s, and that we were in a progressively drier, hotter period. But he thought that we'd probably sometime around like the turn of this century, the period we're in now, that we should bottom out, and that we should start going back up, climbing back up that cooler, wetter period. But then you read other people who have other ideas. And of course there's the blame placed on global warming. There's lots of theories out there, but nothing that's convinced me that it's the one major theory that's going to hold up.
Holcomb: So there really is no theory about why that happens?
Thybony: Well, there's lots of theories.
Holcomb: But no definitive one.
Thybony: Yeah, right at the moment, yeah.
This whole debate on whether logging or thinning would have prevented this fire: The fire in 1910 I mentioned way at the start of this, I use as an example, brought up and written about pretty extensively. All the veteran firefighters all know about it, because some of the major heroes of firefighting: Ed Pulaski, the firefighting tool, the Pulaski, is named after him. And so basically every time they use that tool, it's like this cultural artifact we have. The saga retells itself, because they're using this tool named after this hero, this early forest ranger.
The fire in 1910 ran over, destroyed four small towns, at least eighty-seven people lost their lives, most of those firefighters. It burned more than 3 million acres. Just this catastrophic event that just stunned the forest rangers that survived it, that lived through that. And these guys were all fresh out of Yale, and these were top-notch foresters. You read the stories of these early forest rangers, and to fight a fire they would have to like take a week cutting a trail just to get to a fire. That country up there in the Idaho-Montana country, the Bitterroot Range was the center of the fire. It was just wild wilderness. Most of that 3 million acres that burned was virgin, uncut. So it's as close to pre-settlement conditions that we're probably likely to see. They'd begun to do some logging in there, and they'd cut some small railroads in, and some mining. But basically most of that country was still just this big, vast wilderness. But yet that burned in one of the most destructive fires in U.S. history: All that pre-settlement forest, exactly what we're trying to achieve here, at tremendous expense. Under certain climatic conditions, it's still going to burn. That happened to be very unusual in that the winds that hit were gale force winds, sixty, seventy mile-an-hour winds that hit in a very dry period, when there's already burning hundreds of isolated fires out there. And it just kind of merged all these into one apocalyptic end-of-the-world fire. The guys that lived through that fire, many of them thought that it was actually the end of the world. Entire mountainsides would just ignite instantaneously. The wall of flame would jump canyons a mile wide, would jump rivers. Nothing stopped it. No matter how much treatment of the forest we do, under certain conditions, it becomes a force of nature as much as a hurricane or a flood or an avalanche. In certain fire conditions, I don't think you can prevent it, you just have to be prepared for it.
Holcomb: Do you have any more questions?
Underhill:: Any more thoughts that you want to add?
Thybony: No.
Holcomb: Well, Scott, thank you so much. (unclear) We appreciate it.
Thybony: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]