Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne

from the fire cache.

      Recon 1—with reliable, soft-voiced McLaren calling the shots—is right. The fire is adjacent to the road. The snag has been shattered by lightning into a thousand splinters; a gouged trunk flames on the ground like a candelabra. Kent fires up the pump on the slip-on. While he adjusts the throttle, the SWFFs pull out the hardline hose and drag it toward the fire. In two minutes the fire is out. Incredulous, they buck up the log, roll it over, search through the duff for smoldering cinders. They find nothing. The log steams and hisses. The slip-on chugs happily. They empty the rest of the tank on the log, roll up the hardline, abandon the Scorcher fire, and return to the cache.

      The Kid has just cleared the Shinumo Gate, after a long detour through the Forest. His crew faces another forty-five-minute drive before they come to TT-2. From there they will have to compass at least a mile south cross-country. Kieffer’s crew, meanwhile, has yet to locate their fire. They have hiked nearly two miles down W-1G, then bushwhacked into the woods on a compass bearing. Kieffer is gasping out his presumed location over the radio to Recon 1. His crew is trying to signal McLaren with compass mirrors. They can hear the plane but they cannot see it.

      HOW THE FIREROADS ARE OPENED—AND CLOSED

      Aspen are easy. Ralph kicks most of the branches off the road. If the trunk is dry, he breaks it by snapping it like a whip or by wedging it against other trees and pushing. Bone sits in the truck and shouts friendly obscenities. There are so many branches and logs across the road that you can wear yourself out just getting in and out of the pumper. Ralph drags an aspen log across the road, then hefts another and throws it like a spear. A large bole remains, green and sweating. He motions for a chain saw. Two saws—Big Mac and a Stihl 045—are mounted for easy access onto the slip-on. Bone mocks disgust. “Use an ax,” he shouts. Ralph chops where the trunk narrows; huge chips spray into the woods. Bone cinches his chaps, inserts plugs into his ears, and fires up the Stihl. He lops off the branches, then bucks the bole into sections while Ralph hauls the residue over the road berm. Another tree is visible about forty yards ahead. Bone hesitates before plodding forward, the saw perched on his shoulder. Ralph climbs into the cab and drives to meet him.

      Spruce are dreaded. Some perverse instinct guides them, in their fall, down the center of the road. They descend in clumps; not one tree but several crash at any site. Although the trunks are not large, the branches are prickly; limbing them is like trimming a porcupine. The work goes steadily, but a clump may take half a day to clear. Worse than mop-up. Ralph spots a spruce cluster just beyond the next bend. Only an hour remains until noon; they will work through the maze, then eat. A warm sun streams down on the fireroad—powdery silt, scattered mudholes, and cobbles of buff limestone and hard, spangled chert.

      It is worse than they anticipated. A white fir has crashed across the road and taken several smaller spruce down with it. The bole of the fir is enormous; the branches are large and messy; the tree is heavy with water. Limbing proceeds cautiously. The fir’s weight rests on nearly buried branches, and one tree sits uneasily upon another. They limb cautiously. Almost always the trunk will bind when cut, and often roll to one side; wedges, a sledge, and a second saw are essential. As Bone trudges to the thicket, Ralph prepares another set of chaps, another saw.

      The trunks of the several spruce are all green. Each section, once cut, will resist movement; everything will bind. Ralph and Bone wedge each section free, then wrestle the rounds off the road with peaveys. Too slow. Ralph sets up a chocker chain around a large pine and hooks a snatch block to it, while Bone pulls out the winch cable. Section by section the logs are disassembled, dragged in whining protest over the drainage ditch and across the berm. Ralph and Bone strip every branch from one final round and roll it down the road. The road bends, but the round continues and neatly caroms off into the woods. Finally they kick the littering branches off the road. Still in chaps, they eat lunch under another fir. The next logs down the road are aspen, easy stuff. “Bare hands,” Bone yawns.

      The road gradually descends to the Rim, and after another mile or so they will leave the trashy spruce-fir and enter the more open ponderosa forest. Here logs seem to fall perpendicular to the road; the trunks are round, clean of branches through self-pruning; windfall is less extensive; it is easy business to buck, roll, or winch. If the top of a ponderosa crashes across a road, it can throttle passage with large, cumbersome branches, but with pine only a few judicious cuts, a selective carving, are needed—not a shearing as with spruce and fir. Yet more is at stake than ease of sawing; large expanses of ponderosa coincide with the Rim, and the Rim with fire.

      The Plateau and the Canyon are dichotomous. They meet with catastrophic suddenness along the Rim, a border that is profoundly irrational and immensely powerful. The Plateau is a great inverted dish, shallow and carved into ridges and ravines that radiate outward from a central axis like spokes in an oblong wheel. The hydrologic connection between Plateau and Canyon is subterranean; the Plateau absorbs moisture like a sponge, then discharges it at spectacular springs deep in the Canyon. The surface drainage of the Plateau is a relic of Pleistocene fluvialism, while the sidegorges of the Canyon expand along ancient, long-dormant faults laid down during the flexing of the Plateau. In some areas surface ravines drain away from the Canyon, in others, parallel to it; where a ravine does debouch into the Canyon, its contribution is negligible. The topography of the Plateau does not lead logically to the Canyon Rim; the fireroads do.

      Fires are not limited to the Rim, but they have a peculiar relationship with it, as though snags were somehow ignited by the friction of Canyon against Plateau. To get from point to point along the Rim, however, you must pass back into the Plateau. That means that the fireroads want to go other than where the Plateau wants them to, and it means that the opening of the fireroads is slightly out of sync with the natural cycle of the fire season. The points dry first, and fires appear there earliest in the season; but to reach them, you have to pass into the Plateau, where the snowmelt is incomplete and the roads impassable. The incongruity of the fireroads is the incongruity of fire, Park, and Rim.

      Superimposed on the annual cycle of road opening is a larger history by which the roads were installed, maintained, and abandoned. Clearing the fireroads opens questions of Park policy. Even as we labor to clear the system, there is a movement to shut them permanently. The fireroad grid was largely laid out during the CCC occupation of the Rim, and as a network it reached its apogee during the early 1960s. When fire policy is reformulated, the fireroads feel the impact quickly. Some of the roads are abandoned because they cannot be restored without extensive maintenance. All the roads that pass through meadows are closed for ecological reasons with the exception of those that, like Sublime and W-1 to The Basin, also carry tourists. The euphoria of closure is contagious. E-1, E-2, E-3, E-1A, E-6A, E-6B, E-7, W-2, W-1G, W-1C, W-1B, W-1D-A, W-1D-B, W-5, W-4A, W-4C, W-3, W-1E—the fireroad system of the North Rim is soon gutted.

      We keep some old roads on our fire maps as trails and otherwise increase our reliance on helicopters, though the Park refuses to allow permanent helispots to be constructed and steadily downgrades our priority access to the Park helo. The old fireroad names become disjunctive, remembered by veterans and learned by rookies but without integration or purpose. As the roads close, we nail the old road signs to the fire cache wall and replace their alphanumeric nomenclature with geographic names. W-4B becomes the Swamp Point road; W-1D, E-6, and E-5 become, respectively, the Tiyo Point road, the Obi and Ariel Point roads, the Matthes Point road. But the old names persist, like fire-sculptured snags in green woods.

      The operating principle seems to be that fireroads which are visible to the public but not opened for public travel are condemned, while those with public access, regardless of the terrain through which they pass, are retained. The Park will not deny public access in the face of public criticism, and it will not deny access to the heaviest user of all: itself. To close down all roads would shut off the backcountry not only to visitors and to the fire crew but to rangers, interpreters, and researchers. In fact, as the ranger division swells beyond the carrying capacity of the Rim, it is essential that some fireroads remain open so that excess rangers can undertake “backcountry road patrol.” Thus for major fireroads the Park refuses to let them be either repaired or closed: it wants the roads without appearing to have the roads. Closing fireroads is a way to convey a new fire policy without having to support that policy overtly. It is not fire that the Park wants to manage