news story / By Japhet Weeks

Slow Burn

Wildfires around Orleans are testing how well a community, an Indian tribe and a government agency can work together

(July 3, 2008)  ORLEANS — The drive from the North Coast to Orleans is a long, slow, winding one across three Indian reservations belonging to the Hoopa Valley, the Yurok and the Karuk tribes. At the end of last week, it was also a progressively smokier one, beginning just west of Willow Creek and worsening through Weitchpec and up into the Marble Mountain Wilderness. That’s because this year’s fire season started much earlier than anyone expected when dry lightning in the third week of June set almost 2,500 acres of this rugged landscape aflame. (At press time Tuesday, the fire had expanded to around 6,000 acres.)

With fire-fighting resources stretched to the limit throughout Northern California, the U.S. Forest Service, the Karuk Tribe and local residents around Orleans are expecting this summer to be — like the ride back into these isolated hills — long, tedious and filled with smoke. Residents are also hoping that it will be marked by an unprecedented level of cooperation between the Forest Service, out-of-state wildland fire teams, the local community and the Karuk Tribe, which has a long, rich history of incorporating fire into the landscape.

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At a public meeting held at the Junction School in Somes Bar, just north of Orleans, last Thursday evening, a handful of residents gathered to hear a status report on the fires given by the Ukonom Incident Management Team (ICT). The turnout at the meeting was uncharacteristically low, according to one local resident, but they made up for their small numbers by speaking in a unified and stentorian voice.

If the ICT thought that the residents had come to listen, it was sorely mistaken – the residents had come to make suggestions about how the fires should be fought. Just one example: The ICT explained that a road would be used to block the then-500-acre Merrill Fire (one of four fires burning in the Ukonom Complex at the time), but residents warned against stopping the fire on the upslope of a drainage ditch – burn down to the fire now, they recommended. Agency heads nodded, but no one was taking notes.

Earl Crosby, the Watershed Restoration Coordinator for the Karuk Tribe, urged the ICT to listen to locals like Will Harling, Executive Director of the Mid-Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC), and Frank Lake, a Forest Service research scientist and Karuk descendant, who’s working as the resource coordinator for this incident. Both were at the meeting.

“They know more about this district than all of you combined,” Crosby said. Members of the ICT bristled, but promised they would be open to suggestions. “We’ve seen some stupid mistakes before,” Crosby added. That’s probably because ICTs are rotated out every two weeks. This one had only been around for a couple of days, and its members were still struggling to wrap their heads around the names of local roads and ridges.

The Ukonom Complex fires are understandably low-priority in comparison to other fires burning in California that threaten much larger swathes of private property, but Will Harling considers the blaze a unique opportunity to heal the local relationship to fire.

Harling started the Orleans/Somes Bar Fire Safe Council in 2001, and later grew his organization to include watershed-wide issues. Harling, who corrected me saying he was a fire lighter, not a firefighter, talks about stewarding fire in what he refers to as the local fireshed.

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