Other than the presence of 950 wildland firefighters in Ketchum, a town with a population of some 3,000 people, perhaps the most apparent aspect of the Castle Rock Fire suppression effort has been the back burning operations going on just outside of town.
Starting Tuesday, Aug. 21, fire crews began intentionally setting fire to unburned areas away from town and behind fire line cut by a combination of hand crews and bulldozer operators. Starting near the Heidelberg Hill trail adjacent to Ketchum's Warm Springs neighborhood and in the lower Adams Gulch area, fire crews have continued to burn additional areas on a daily basis.
By Thursday afternoon, firefighters had burned expansive areas of fire line in the lower Warm Springs Creek drainage nearly to lower Board Ranch, in all of lower Adams Gulch, in the Hulen Meadows neighborhood and across the eastern slopes of 8,411-foot Griffin Butte.
Fire managers intend to continue back burning to the Castle Rock Fire's northern perimeter, Sawtooth National Recreation Area Public Information Officer Ed Cannady said Thursday afternoon during a driving tour of the fire along the Warm Springs Creek Road. Cannady is working closely with the arm of the Castle Rock Fire's Type 1 incident management team tasked with public relations.
"The plan is to take it all the way to Fox Creek," Cannady said of the back burning operations.
The visible nature of the back burns, as well as their obvious impacts on the hillsides surrounding Ketchum, has been a source of discussion from day one. But for all the smoke and flames, the operations have apparently gone quite well.
"The weather is certainly working in our favor," Cannady said.
Headed north through Ketchum before noon on Thursday, a large column of smoke was plainly visible in the shallow saddle on Griffin Butte's eastern face.
Arriving at the base of the Penny Lake Chutes area in the lower Warm Springs Creek drainage less than a mile west of Ketchum minutes later, Cannady pointed to firefighters walking single file along the open, south-facing slope. Behind one of them, a long, straight line of flames trailed off in the opposite direction.
A firefighter was using a drip torch to ignite flames, Cannady said. These handheld tools contain a diesel-gasoline mixture that is ignited as it drops to the ground.
Firefighters using drip torches essentially go "Johnny Appleseed and drop fire," Cannady said.
Near the firefighter walking east to west along the Warm Springs face, a burned over aspen stand caught Cannady's eye. In the coming years, those areas of the stand that die off will come back thicker and more robust than before, he said.
Cannady said the changes will be noticeable in as little as a year.
"The aspens will have exploded," he said. "You'll be amazed how fast it will come back."
As a comparison, one only has to look in the White Cloud Mountains where the 40,000-acre Valley Road Fire burned in 2005. Aspen stands there are doing quite well, Cannady said.
Just a year later, some of the regenerated aspen trees were as tall as 6 to 8 feet, he said.
"They just went to town," he said. "This is the best thing for an aspen stand."
While federal land managers with the Sawtooth National Forest likely would not have used the same tactics to create defensible, wildfire-resistant space around the Ketchum community, Cannady said the back burning operations going on for the Castle Rock Fire will have a similar effect.
He said areas adjacent to the burn-outs will have a much better chance of remaining safe from wildfires for many years to come. The primary purpose of such operations is to remove burnable materials from an area so an advancing wildfire will be robbed of fuel when it reaches the blackened areas.
Most importantly, back burning gives firefighters the upper hand.
"We say when it burns," Cannady said.
To whatever extent they can, fire crews use "existing facilities and natural features" when building fire line in preparation for burnout operations, Cannady said. Not only does this help preserve the landscape, but it also makes fire line construction a lot faster.
Two hotshot crews currently building direct hand line in the Fox Creek drainage are using these kinds of tactics by sticking to whatever trails in the area they can, Cannady said.
Later in the season, fire managers will sometimes choose to not use burnout operations and simply stick to direct line construction to hold a fire if there is favorable weather in the forecast, he said. Because there are so many homes adjacent to the Castle Rock Fire, and no precipitation is forecast, such a move wouldn't be safe in the case of this fire.
"If we had a big snowstorm in the immediate forecast we probably wouldn't be doing as much burnouts."
Behind this transport vehicle for the Mormon Lake Hotshots from Flagstaff, Ariz., a large burnout operation in the Penny Lake Chutes area in the lower Warm Springs Creek drainage takes place Thursday. Photo by Jason Kauffman
