Chasing Smoke by Aaron Williams

Author:Aaron Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wildfire, Firefighters, British Columbia, Biography
ISBN: 9781550178067
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2017-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

4

Chelaslie River Fire Tour #1

July 31–August 13, 2014

Back in May of 2006 the Telkwa Rangers were called to a fire south of Vanderhoof. The snow had been off the ground for only a couple of weeks. But a short warm spell meant everything dead from the previous fall was cured and ready to burn.

On our way to this fire we were held up by a section of road that had mysteriously become muddy. Each time a truck drove through the section the road sank, like a rotten roof under a heavy snow load. By the time the last trucks drove through, the road was a grey slurry only passable in four-wheel drive with the pedal to the floor.

At first we thought it was just spring melt. But after a while we realized what we were seeing was a consequence of the mountain pine beetle infestation. For millenniums these beetles kept forests in check, killing off older trees and leaving their dry husks to nurture the soil or burn up in rejuvenating wildfires. But in the midnineties an infestation of the beetles took off and grew so big that it eventually killed off forests covering a fifth of the province’s land mass.

One reason beetle populations got so out of hand was climate change; they thrive in warmer temperatures. Another was overambitious forest firefighting. For the better part of a century, the policy was to fight any forest fire, no matter how remote. Thus, the number of mature pines susceptible to beetles had never been greater.

I remember standing next to that bit of road trying to wrap my head around how this plague had caused the entire water table to rise. How the road had turned to porridge because there weren’t enough living trees to sop up spring snowmelt.

After a few years, beetle-killed trees shed their needles. “Grey and dead” is what we call these ghost pines. There are billions of them in the Interior of BC. Desert-dry standing sticks of firewood.

This was the state of the forest in the Ootsa Lake area when, on July 8, 2014, at 6:23 p.m., Nancy Dogleon, one of only a few people still employed as fire lookouts in BC, made a call to the Northwest Fire Centre. Lightning had started a fire in a remote area. For several days the Ministry left it alone, part of an effort in recent years to let wildfires burn free when possible.

Despite its attempt to leave it alone, three weeks after Nancy’s call, the Ministry sends us to what is now known as the Chelaslie River fire.

We drive south from the town of Burns Lake, crossing François Lake on the government-run ferry. Another two hours of driving and we’ve reached a second water crossing. This one will take us to the south side of Ootsa Lake and the western flank of the fire.

We drive onto a cable barge that used to serve the logging industry but doesn’t see much action now. Isaac, a skinny man with short, thinning hair, runs the barge.

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