SUBLIMITY, Ore. -- The ash falls like snowflakes as still-burning trees are felled at Silver Falls State Park.
The Silver Creek Fire was spotted and contained quickly at the largest state park in Oregon, which attracted 1.3 million visitors last year. Crews are in the final stages of mopping it up, but there is much park officials can learn from the experience and can apply in the future.
There was a wildfire plan in place for Silver Falls State Park – which hasn’t had a major wildfire in a century – but it was outdated. It wasn’t until the firefighters arrived that they discovered how out of date it was.
“The park, they said they’re going to do the same thing and they’ll have that on the books and try to come up with ways to mitigate the hazards they already have,” said Mark DesJardin, Incident Commander trainee for the Oregon Department of Forestry.
“And a lot of times they shoot out 10, 15, 100 years on what they’re going to do to try and reduce that potential of fire, without ruining the benefits we all enjoy here at the park.”
Most operations at the park were unaffected by the fire as it was quickly contained at 27 acres.
The fire was located far from the park’s popular Trail of Ten Falls and its visitor spots like campgrounds and the Silver Falls Lodge & Conference Center.
Not the first fire at Silver Falls
This was the largest wildfire at the park in recent times.
“Up here in 1918 was the largest fire in Oregon,” Oregon Parks and Recreation Department Forester Craig Leech said. “It was over 900,000 acres. It was just this whole area, this whole part of the Cascades.”
DesJardin said he found several old fire scars on larger trees in the area of the current fire, and those trees are still alive and doing fine.
The Silver Creek Fire was started when a tree was hit by lightning during a June 18 storm and slowly smoldered until high temperatures and low humidity allowed the fire to emerge July 12 as a hard-to-find plume of smoke.
One major challenge fire crews faced when finding the fire is there are few roads that lead anywhere near the area of the park where the fire burned.
There are old logging roads in the park. The ones that led to the location of the fire were overgrown and had to be bulldozed so fire crews could get trucks and other equipment through.
“And that also kind of brought up the issue of maintaining more of our fire roads, but beefing those up, maintaining those, keeping those brushed out so they have quicker access,” Leech said.
The technology employed to fight the fire helped keep it from spreading farther and put it out more efficiently.
The firefighters were able to accurately map the extent of the fire with apps on their phones, used drones to spot fire they couldn’t see from the ground and hand-held infrared cameras to identify areas on the ground where the fire was still smoldering.
“Technology it just advances at such a fast rate, we’re just trying to keep up on all the potential uses for it,” DesJardin said.
What will happen next?
There are many decisions to be made about the 27 acres of the 9,200-acre park the fire scorched.
Options include removing the damaged and felled logs, cutting the rest of the damaged trees and leaving it alone to regrow.
“We have a decision process that we make internally and we look at all the factors such as reburn potential, hazardousness of sending someone back into an area like that if there was a reburn,” Leech said.
“We’re so early into the game here of just working on suppression and a heavy-duty fire season that that’s not really thought out yet.”
When will the impacted areas reopen?
Silver Falls State Park Ranger Supervisor Chris Gilliand said he expects the YMCA summer camp and the rest of the Howard Creek horse camp will reopen this summer.
Both areas were near the fire, but were only affected by smoke. They were used as staging areas by fire crews.
“We don’t know for sure when the YMCA camp Silver Creek will reopen, but it will definitely open again,” Gilliand said. “Some of their activities they do at camp will be limited just because of their proximity to the fire, but they will reopen soon.”
A plane flies overhead toward a fire burning in Silver Falls State Park on Friday, July 13, 2018. CONNOR RADNOVICH / Statesman Journal
Oregon Department of Forestry Public Information Officer Ryan Gordon said the department will continue to have crews monitoring the Silver Creek Fire until sufficient rain comes in the fall.
“Eagle Creek had two holdover fires this spring,” Eric Perkins, the Incident Commander for the Oregon Department of Forestry, said of last September’s fire in the Columbia Gorge. “It’s the exact same concept.
“Some of these hollowed-out trees, something can sit there and slowly burn like a wet cigar and come back to life when everything starts to dry back out when you put a little wind on it.”
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