programs

Fire & Fuels - Prescribed Burning Program

OFSC collaborates with Orleans Vol. Fire Dep.

The Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council (OSB FSC) is facilitating collaborative strategic restoration planning and hazardous fuels reduction throughout our community. Our five-year strategic plan calls for the use of prescribed broadcast burning as a cost efficient tool for reducing hazardous fuels on pre-treated private lands, and for maintaining these treated areas over time. Use of prescribed fire may be the only viable long-term method for protecting our communities, as well as restoring desired forest conditions that benefit elk and other wildlife.

Prescribed Burning

Prescribed burning is something that landowners around here have been doing for years to reduce fuels and manage cultural gathering areas. Before that, the Karuk used fire as their primary land management tool for untold millennia, shaping the forests that we see along the Klamath Corridor today.

The OSB FSC is aware that the success of our first burning projects may determine if we have continued funding and landowner support. We will be providing multiple safety measures to ensure success, including having a fire engine on site, creating firelines around all burned areas, and provided a trained Type I or II Fire Crew to conduct the burns. Burns will be done in the late Fall and early Spring when the rate of fire spread is slow and there is still residual moisture in the larger fuels.

OSB FSC Grants

The OSB FSC has recently received $16,000 from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to match $54,000 from the Wildland Urban Interface Program that will be used to prepare for 100 acres of prescribed burning and 40 acres of associated fuels reduction this Fall and next Spring. These burns will be conducted in previously treated fuelbreaks to maintain and improve their ability to stop fires, while provided much needed winter forage for elk.

In addition to the grants listed above, the OSB FSC has also received $110,000 from the USFS Community Protection Program to treat 80 acres, and $40,000 from the BLM Community-Based Wildfire Prevention Program to treat 30 acres around at-risk private properties in the Orleans/Somes Bar area. Fuels reduction will be conducted throughout this coming Fall, Winter and Spring.

Western Marble Winter Elk Forage Improvement Project

Klamath River Roosevelt Elk

The Western Marble Winter Elk Forage Improvement grant from the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is the first grant from a private organization received by the OSB FSC. This project is located between the Klamath River and the western front of the Marble Mountain Wilderness Area on the Ukonom Ranger District; a part of the Klamath National Forest and Karuk Ancestral Territory. Treatment sites are known critical winter foraging areas utilized by the Sandy Ridge herd of Roosevelt Elk. These elk summer in the vast meadows of the Western Marble Mountains, and move down into open midslope and Klamath River riparian habitats when snow levels push them out of the high country. Local guide, Dean McBroom, estimates the herd to be between 300 and 500 head.

Fire Suppression by Helicopter

Nearly 100 years of active fire suppression along the Klamath River corridor has resulted in landscape level conversion of historic Roosevelt Elk winter foraging habitat. Once extensive grasslands and oak woodlands, maintained by human fire use and wildfires, have been encroached upon by conifer and shrub species. Local wildlife biologists and guides believe that decreases in abundance and distribution of highly nutritious grass and forb species associated with these habitats may be the main factor limiting the size of the local herd. Lack of forage has forced the elk to increase use of rare meadow and open habitat maintained by private landowners, causing considerable impacts to human use areas and increasing the potential for depredation.

Elk before (top) and after a prescribed burn

This project will utilize fuels reduction and prescribed fire to maintain and expand existing oak woodland and meadow habitats on private properties that provide winter elk forage and habitat. Expansion of these habitats will draw elk use impacts away from human use areas. Shaded fuelbreaks will include a mosaic of vegetation patches (20%) to provide some cover for elk. Fuels reduction will target conifer and shrub species less than 10 inches dbh. This project will complement adjacent USFS projects currently being planned, and provide multiple benefits, including increased elk winter habitat and forage, reduced wildfire risk, restoration of habitats impacted by fire suppression, and improvement of cultural use plants for gathering.

For more information about this project, to request fuels reduction on your property, or to learn more about how you can make your home Fire Safe, contact the Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council.