Experts: Managing tribal forest helped stop Wallow Fire at reservation

Blackened, rusted and bent, a barbed wire fence snakes along the boundary of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation and the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in eastern Arizona's White Mountains. To the east, a sea of black rolls with the land as trees resemble burnt matchsticks. The national forest stand is dense with young trees. Most won't survive. To the west, on tribal land, the trees are spread farther apart, with blackened dirt hidden by growth of wild strawberries and forest grasses. The trees on this side of the fence, for the most part, will live. It was along this line that fire ecologists and forest managers say the westward expansion of the Wallow Fire, the largest in Arizona's history, slowed and eventually stopped. Touring the area, Jonathan Brooks, tribal forest manager for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said forest management strategies unhindered by environmental litigation and drawn-out federal government processes helped check the wildfire here. For decades, the tribe has cleared young trees, logged larger trees and burned underbrush to replicate the natural burn-and-growth cycle of the Ponderosa pine forest. Brooks said that made it easy for firefighters to create a backfire here to deprive the approaching Wallow Fire of fuel. "Had this area not been thinned, logged, prescribe-burned, we wouldn't have been able to do a burnout operation here - so the fire would've been able to come through here unchecked," he said. A new federal government report that analyzed the Wallow Fire's impact on tribal lands supports Brooks' assessment. In addition, the Wallow Fire Fuels Treatment Effectiveness Report, prepared by agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs, notes that the Wallow Fire killed fewer trees on the Fort Apache and San Carlos Apache reservations because it burned less intensely there...more

Take a look at the report. The pictures tell the whole story.