BLM Fire and National Conservation Lands managers collaborate to meet shared goals

As the Bureau of Land Management celebrates the 25th anniversary of the National Conservation Lands, it is worth noting the Bureau’s approach to protecting, managing, and restoring the outstanding objects, resources, and values found in these special places. One important key to fulfilling this mission is fire prevention, suppression, and proactive fuels management. 

Fuels treatments of all kinds – including prescribed fire as well as machine and hand thinning and targeted grazing – are important to supporting BLM’s National Conservation Lands. These spectacular landscapes, located primarily in the West, include about 38 million acres of BLM-managed national monuments, national conservation areas, wilderness and wilderness study areas, wild and scenic rivers, and national scenic and historic trails. 

“Many [National Conservation Lands] units have a long history of fire management including suppression and the reintroduction of fire through prescribed burning,” said Molly Anthony, division chief for BLM Fuels Management and Fire Planning at the National Interagency Fire Center. “This provides a wealth of historical data and ongoing opportunities to observe the long-term effects of different fire regimes and management strategies.”  

The BLM recognizes it’s better to prevent severe fires than to fight them later. With prescribed fire, burn plans identify the best conditions under which fuels like trees and other vegetation will safely burn while meeting resource objectives. Fire managers analyze the weather for a “burn window” to ensure conditions described in the burn plan are met and then conduct a carefully controlled ignition to reduce targeted fuels to a safer level.  

The BLM is on track to treat approximately 740,000 acres within National Conservation Lands units from 2022 to 2027. Such fuels treatments help keep severe fires from spreading to private property and conserve and protect firefighting resources, including the lives of firefighters. They also illustrate how fire and fuel managers work with National Conservation Lands staff to meet shared goals. 

For example, parts of the 10,000-acre Wales Creek wilderness study area (WSA) in western Montana represent a proverbial tinderbox with its various species of pine, fir, spruce, and larch trees growing amid a tangle of blown-over lodgepole pine and other dry materials. Besides having a variety of conifers and other vegetation, the area is home to grizzly bears, cutthroat trout, and the occasional lynx passing through. The WSA is also important habitat for the western pearlshell mussel, a Bureau sensitive species, providing a natural laboratory for scientists wanting to understand best practices to preserve the freshwater mollusk. 

The Wales Creek WSA “was ripe for a bad fire,” said Michael Albritton, now the Missoula assistant field manager who helped lead a prescribed burn there in fall 2019. This effort and others like it are creating patches of burned or “treated” space amid the thick mature forest. The goal is to make natural fire behavior more likely than severe fire that could destroy important habitat and vegetation.  

“Outside of the WSA, we’ve done a great job creating these patches using all the tools of vegetation management such as timber sales, thinning, and prescribed burning,” Albritton said, recognizing that wilderness areas and WSAs have restrictions that can make fuels treatments more challenging.  

In particular, the Wilderness Act generally restricts the use of mechanized tools and mechanical transport to protect the wilderness character. However, the Act does allow managers to take necessary action to control wildland fire through fire management planning and a minimum requirement analysis to select low-impact tactics. In this case, crews were able to conduct the burn without heavy equipment, although an exception was made for chainsaws.  

The prescribed fire took several years of planning before it could happen. This included not only development of a burn plan but also a watershed assessment and environmental analysis. In this case, it took four years before a safe burn window became available. When the time was right, the prescribed fire was initiated by two helicopters using ignition devices. 

The effort was worth the wait. Goals for vegetation and fuels thinning were met. Due to the dry fuels, the burn resulted in a high-severity, stand-replacing fire that made way for a new forest of lodgepole pine. This year, Albritton visited the 650-acre burn site and found green and growing knee-high lodgepole pines and a greatly reduced fuel load.  

This patch within the broader WSA and more like it will help slow a severe fire. Today, two more prescribed burns are planned that will give the Wales Creek WSA a patchwork mosaic of different aged trees.  

Similar work is being done to the east of Wales Creek at two national monuments, Upper Missouri River Breaks and Pompeys Pillar. According to Pat Harty, BLM Fuels Program lead for the Montana/Dakotas State Office, such burns help to “maintain the character of the land [and] make fires easier to contain and control when they do happen.”  

Such actions advance the objectives of both the BLM Fire program and the National Conservation Lands, which is ultimately a win for the communities the BLM serves.  

“Like many areas across the West, decades of wildfire suppression has led to an unhealthy buildup of burnable vegetation,” said Anthony. “By managing fuel loads through techniques like prescribed fire, we can reintroduce fire as a natural process to restore ecosystems and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires and their impacts on communities, recreation opportunities, and natural and cultural resources.”