Prediction: Flood or fire season?

Most years May is the time we start to worry about fire and flood. If we have a heavy snowpack we worry about a June flood, if we have a low snowpack we worry about a long fire season with possible stand replacement fires.

With a big fire in Alberta, Canada and one good-sized fire already in The Bob Marshall Wilderness it would seem like fire is going to be the big worry this year. In fact, one local resident told me this week that the North Fork River had already peaked for this year.

Don’t bet the ranch on that. True, the river was muddy for a day or two in the warm weather before turning green again. One shot of muddy water does not mean that runoff is finished. Teakettle Mountain may be bare but there is a lot of snow in the high country. Red Meadow and Trail Creek roads are still blocked by snow indicating plenty of snow on the Whitefish Divide and Glacier’s Peaks are still white with snow.

In fact, although these was a light winter in the valley, snowpack in the mountains was just shy of normal. Besides, the big factor in whether or not we have a flood is not so much the snowfall in the winter, as how it melts. So far we have had great weather to avoid flooding. Warm weather to melt the snow followed by freezing to slow it down. My bet is the river will peak in early June, as it usually does, and only unusually warm weather combined with heavy rain like in 1948 and 1964 could cause severe flooding.

Fire is another matter. Years of failure to manage fuels in the forest brought us major fires in 1988, 2001 and 2003. Those big swathes of blackened forest have reduced fire danger in The North Fork except along the flanks of those fires where dead unburnt trees (like Glacier Rim in 2015) provide areas of heavy fuels.

North of the Wedge Canyon Fire residents and the state and federal agencies have done a lot of fuel management to reduce the threat of a really big fire and work in other areas has helped too. Fuel management is not a one time thing but an ongoing need. Since 1955 I have removed commercial products—posts and sawlogs—from my forty acres on seven occasions. In addition there have been several thinning projects and there is more to do.

We will always have wildfire. I firmly believe we can avoid the big fires that burn thousands of acres if we aggressively manage the trees to provide a mixed-age forest, wildlife diversity, and multiple recreational opportunities and a viable timber industry.

What do you think?