Saw the pic on the internets. Amazing! I needed a spot to sleep while on a recent road trip and found an epic vantage point above Snoqualmie Pass, WA. Multiple wildfires, and Seattle's light pollution made for a very intense scene! During a recent road trip up north, I spent the night out of Snoqualmie Pass, WA. Epic light pollution from Seattle's suburbs, multiple wild fires, and the 90 interstate winding through the mountains made for some incredible lighting to frame Mt. Ranier and the milky way rising above it. http://imgur.com/AmWThvw
wow..I just came back from Bend and it's like the entire state decided to barbecue at the same time..plastics and all. The moon was blood red two nights ago and Beaver orange last night.
The number of active fires in the PNW is in the hundreds. There are so many fires; most firefighting efforts are going into trying to save homes and property. The firefighters are so overwhelmed that putting the fires out is not an option in most cases. I have been very closely monitoring the fires in an area of Idaho (for personal reasons). In only two Idaho counties, at least 42 homes and over 75 outbuildings were lost to the fires last week. The fires are still burning. Also last week there was a public notice. Anyone that completed a one day training session would be hired as a temp firefighter. Out of work loggers (due to the fires) were encouraged to attend. We can only hope for no more strong winds to spread the fires, and rain to put them out. Man is not going to conquer this fire season. Mother Nature is our only hope.
http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/...a-drought-delta-smelt-survey-tallies-one-fish The fish exerts such force on the Delta's waters that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service regulates how and when pumping can be done to protect it and other imperiled endangered species. Since the smelt is protected under the Endangered Species Act, a federal court order can -- and has -- reduced pumping to farmers and cities in Southern California. Yet this protection hasn't been enough for a species that lives in the pipeline of California's critical hydraulic system. Efforts to stave off the fish's demise have been pointless and magnify the human suffering of the drought, said Chris Scheuring, attorney for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "A lot of water has been thrown at the problem, to no apparent effect," he said. "Twenty million Californians depend on a water supply kept away from them by one small, little population of fish." Good riddance, wrote Fresno-based Harry Cline of the Farm Press Blog. Turning off the pumps that serve the state and federal water projects wasted about 800,000 acre-feet of water in 2013 "based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes."
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is going to be the ruin of the ecosystem in our country. It over-protects one species to the point of doing great harm to other species. I can make a case that the large harmful fires we are having today and discussing in this thread, are the direct result of selective science used 25 years ago, to protect the spotted owl that was listed under the ESA. As a result of the spotted owl lie, 99% of all harvesting of wood products on public lands has stopped. Every year, more fuel is added to our forests. Forest managers understand the danger this has caused. They have often petitioned to do thinning projects that would not only reduce the fire danger by removing some of the fuel; it would also improve the habitat for many birds and animals by supplying them with more food. Every attempt to improve the health of our forests has been met with a legal filing by some special interest group with an agenda.
Clearly the water would have made the central valleys green instead of brown and greatly reduced the risk of wild fires or them getting out of control.
My backyard opens up into thousands of acres of BLM land and they've been thinning it for a long time without clear cutting..I'm glad logging practices have gone that route. Not sure about eastern Oregon but way back before the spotted owl issue there were still plenty of forest fires. Manzanita in California is the hottest burning shrub in the forest..once it gets going, it'll burn without mercy so there are plenty of causes..in Tahoe Nat'l Forest, it's cigarettes thrown out the window by tourists on interstate 80 that cause a lot of them. I do think they need to readdress logging parameters in Oregon though.
The thinning behind your place, which I believe you, is one of the very few tracks of land that have made it through the mine fields in the legal system placed by the special interest groups. Your thinned area is not the norm, not even close. Yes, there have always been forest fires. The problem is, the fires are getting progressively worse, larger, and more dangerous. Reason, yearly increases in the fuel supply due to lack of thinning. More OR. WA. & Idaho public lands need to be thinned. The problem is, logging and thinning are similar, and the special interest “save the trees wackos” try to stop every thinning attempt in the PNW. When public lands are logged, the Federal, State and local governments all receive part of the proceeds from the timber sales. When public lands are thinned, the Governmental agency managing the land pays for the thinning. Thinning spends revenues which are limited by shrinking budgets. There are many causes of forest fires, some man made, and some natural. The reason we have so many fires today was due to a thunderstorm that passed through the PNW about two weeks ago. Hundreds of fires started at one time from lighting strikes. Unless you have some connection way high up, not sure how to stop fires started by lighting?
This is true. I remember during the Clinton administration (1993-2000), the government purposefully set fires and because they hadn't done any thinning efforts (thanks environmental whackos!) the fires grew out of control and even threatened some important government facilities (Los Alamos, for one). http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/U...&productType=IncludedProducts&page=1&b=f6c888 And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Grande_Fire
Disclaimer, this post is a pure rant, you can delete if you want, but it is all true. Not the selected science we have been hearing for so long. The save the tree whackos have not saved one tree! NOT ONE!! Reason, consumption of wood products has steadily increased in the USA, not decreased. The save the tree whackos are still wiping their butts with toilet paper, hanging from Portland bridges on rope, living in houses, and being comfy on furniture, all made of wood. EXCEPT, much of it is now imported, not manufacture here in the PNW. 25 years ago, the USA had a positive trade balance on wood products. We now have a negative trade balance on wood products that is in the many billions of $$ every year. The save the tree whackos have hurt the USA $$, taken timber sales revenues from Govts. at all levels, which resulted in higher taxes and reduced public services, while sending 100,000 high paying jobs out of the PNW to other countries. Now about the spotted owl lie. The spotted owl did not need old growth timber to live, nor was logging hurting the spotted owls population growth. Spotted owls were found living in McDonald signs, which was ignored by then. We all agree the population of the spotted owl was in danger. However, the true cause was ignored. The decline was due to predators of the spotted owl which include the great horned owl, the red-tailed hawk and the raven. Unlike most animals the spotted owl doesn't always defend its young from predators. The save the spotted owl people used selective science propaganda to achieve their agenda, which was to stop logging on public lands, and the masses bought into it.
A real head scratcher that baffles me is that even though I live a few miles from one of the biggest mills around here, I can't buy lumber there. They drive lumber past my property 20 miles or more into the city and I have to drive the 40 mile round trip to buy a few boards or posts. That's a real eco setup they've got going.
To you people saying that the reason the fires are so bad is because the forest hasn't been logged, you really don't shit about fire ecology. Healthy forests need to burn occasionally; fire kills beetles, clears out under-story (crown fires that take kill the big stuff are the exception not the rule), helps cull out weakened or diseased trees and so forth. Intensive logging (particularly clearcuts) are the kind of disturbance that encourage scrubby, flashy fuels to take over a site, which chokes out the Western Hemlock and Douglas Fir saplings and prevents them from reaching maturity as quickly as they otherwise would in a normal disturbance-succession pattern (which usually means fire in the west). What's the problem this year? The fire seasons over the past decade have been relatively mild, which means a lot of fuel on the ground combined with a really severe drought and historically high temperatures which means not only are the 100 hour fuels completely cured (small diameter downed timber, scrub, near-surface duff, etc.) but the 1000 hour fuels (downed logs between 3-8 inches and deep duff, etc.) are dried to the point where all it takes is a little bit of lightning and a little bit of wind and away we go. The only real concern is that climate zones appear to be shifting north (and to higher elevations). If that trend holds over the long-term then it's likely we'll see the Doug Fir forests of the PNW replaced with more Ponderosa and Lodgepole pine forests. If it makes that transition, big burns are going to be more and more common as the old forest dies off and gives way to species that are more drought resistant. For those who think I'm just spouting some hippy-dippy bullshit, then what I'll say is that I do have a little bit of background here. I have an uncle who was a choke setter for 20 years for Weyerhauser before switching to operating a yarder, both my grandfathers drove logging trucks, and most of my family has relied on logging and the forest in one way or another for their livelihood at some point, so I can appreciate the human cost associated with shutting down the woods, but on the other hand I fought wildland fire for three summer for the Oregon Department of Forestry and I got to work for the National Interagency Fire Center as a GIS tech for three years and part of my post-grad dealt with building geophysical models for predicting fire behavior so I've become intimately aware of both sides of the issue. On the one hand it's awful to see people's homes lost and livelihoods threatened, but on the other we're also reaping the consequences of over-management that persisted all the way into the late nineties, where fire-fighting was treated like a military campaign and fires were never allowed to run their course.
