More Field Visits

I had the opportunity this week to visit two fires that burned last year within a few hours of SLC. We spent all day Monday on the Salt Creek Fire that burned on the south entrance of the Nebo Loop. We recruited the fire ecologist from the Uinta Wasatch Cache NF to be our hostess. She spent the day with us showing us various parts of this fire and some of the invasive species they're tracking. This fire burned mostly grass, sagebrush, oak, and juniper. Sagebrush doesn't regenerate easily; nor does juniper. But the grass and oak naturally resprout and are doing fine.

Observing the maps and the landscape.

The oak brush burned down to the nubbins, but it is a basal resprouter, meaning it comes back from the roots with no problem. Hard to kill this stuff.

More regenerating oak.


After spending a night in Nephi, we drove to Fillmore to meet a few BLM folks there who are responsible for the monitoring on the Milford Flats fire. This fella was the biggest fire in Utah's recorded history (~360,000 acres). We spent the entire day driving through and walking around this fire. It was crazy to see the scale of this thing. The only difficult thing was trying to picture the fire itself. Since we were there a year after it burned, and since it's so dang windy down there, there is little evidence of a burn scar. There wasn't much biomass to begin with and now there's slightly less. The BLM is taking drastic steps to "build" an ecosystem that is productive for them and the ranchers who lease out their lands for grazing. The BLM is planting thousands of acres of grass out there in the hopes that the rain and winds will cooperate and allow seedlings.

This area burned completely and with the high winds they get, filled in with sand. They are trying to plant grasses here and this area has been recently worked over but machinery like you see below.

Here's an example of what worked. The BLM considered this area a success. These grass clumps were planted last summer and are coming up well with plenty of seed stock. They're hoping the winter weather here will really help this area explode. Very little cheat grass existed here.