LAKE CUSHMAN, Mason County — Chain saw. Gas can. Pulaski ax. Pack.
The gear clanged onto the boat one by one as the Zigzag Hotshots prepared to ferry into the smoke Thursday.
This firefighting team was headed in to clear fuels around homes on the northwest side of the lake. Things were heating up on the Olympic Peninsula’s Bear Gulch fire, the state’s largest active wildland blaze.
The fire has been riding the changes in weather this summer, including heat waves and rainfall. It burns in one of the country’s wettest forests, something that might become more frequent with drought and warming.
Most of the fire’s growth happened over just seven hot and dry days since it sparked July 6, from a human cause that’s still under investigation. At one point it sent a column of smoke nearly 30,000 feet into the air, visible from as far as Seattle and Aberdeen. Popular hiking and camping areas remain closed. So far, homes and buildings have been spared, and no one has been injured.
The fire is the biggest on the Olympic Peninsula since 1951, said Jeff Bortner, a fire management officer representing both Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest.
“Generally, our fires are within the natural range of variability,” Bortner said of fires on the east slopes of the Olympics. “The current Bear Gulch fire is testing that theory a little bit because it’s certainly bigger than anything in the historical records.”
Bear Gulch fire
The Bear Gulch fire sparked July 6 in Olympic National Forest and has burned over 8,000 acres around and northwest of the Staircase area of Olympic National Park. The fire, in steep, rugged terrain, is mostly uncontained.
This part of the forest gets an average of about 100 inches of rain each year. That, coupled with long periods without fire, means a lot of dense fuel is available for the flames, compared with drier areas.
Unlike fires that explode in the flashy fuels of Central and Eastern Washington, Western Washington fires typically smolder in the duff — the dense, peaty layer of partially decomposed moss and debris that builds up in these productive moist temperate forests — until the fall rains arrive.
Climate change, materializing in drought, drier fuels and higher temperatures, will likely fuel more of these smaller west side fires, said Crystal Raymond, deputy director of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative, a research group.
Last week, scenes from the Bear Gulch fire illuminated how fire moves through these wetter forests.
More than 40 days in, root wads smoldered on the hillsides. Big, old evergreens had tumbled from their perches, and blackened cedar roots were exposed along the road to the Staircase recreation area. Ribbons of burned and blackened trees, crisp Oregon grape and ferns were left in the fire’s path.
Deer grazed near a booth, wrapped in protective, heat-resistant material, where National Park rangers would typically check and issue passes to enter.
A red-flag warning had been issued for the Olympics this weekend, and the U.S. Forest Service warned Friday of dry, high temperatures and easterly winds, increasing fire potential for much of Oregon and Washington over the next week.
A fast start
West Mason fire Chief Matt Welander was the first on the scene when the Bear Gulch fire started racing up Mount Rose. Even before arriving, he called in for a helicopter, understanding the rugged terrain.
“The steepness of the terrain, how far it was off the road initially, and then, not just all of that, but everything that was on fire was logs that could roll down the hill, rocks that could get kicked loose, lot of dead snags, things that would be dangerous for (any) firefighters,” Welander said. “From the very beginning, this was a fire that needed specialized people, specialized equipment, specialized teams.”
It grew a couple of hundred acres in the first 24 hours.
“I didn’t know how big it was until I was on my way home and I could look back and see it running up the hill,” Welander said.
Hotter, drier, unstable conditions fueled some of the fire’s biggest runs between bouts of cooler, wetter marine weather.
The fire tore through nearly 1,200 acres, mostly in the Six Stream drainage, on Aug. 12, pushing deeper into the park.
On the defensive
Maple syrup and greasy hash browns wafted through the chow tent as firefighters refueled and the sun crested the treetops Thursday morning.
They would spread far and wide across the wilderness.
It’s a stunningly beautiful place, said Tom Clemo, incident commander of California Complex Incident Management Team 7, who is also a deputy fire chief in Santa Monica. But it’s very unforgiving country for firefighters — steep, rugged, rocky and, in some places, inaccessible on foot.
That forces firefighters to play defense, rather than offense: building or improving existing fire breaks; wrapping homes, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure with protective material; and making targeted bucket drops on spot fires to slow them down.
A helicopter soared through the valley early Thursday afternoon. Firefighters would drop 43,000 gallons where things were starting to perk up.
Nearly 30 firefighters and medics were flown earlier this week into the Daniel J. Evans Wilderness to prepare the area, including footbridges along Madeline Creek and Seven and Eight streams.
Paramedics Meredith Inman and Konnor Kennedy, with contractor Adventure Medics, would join firefighters in remote areas, ensuring they had proper hydration and access to medical care.
A chain saw groaned from the Staircase area where hazardous trees were being removed, and crews were monitoring potential hot spots.
Hector Garcia, a contract firefighter with ASI Arden Solutions, cut downed trees and branches to create slash piles with his crew near the Copper Creek trailhead.
The roar of water pumps ricocheted off Lake Cushman. Some 150 miles of hose had been laid on the northwest side of the lake for structure protection.
The fire was at about 8,500 acres as of Friday. With higher temperatures forecast, conditions were starting to climb the roller coaster again.
“Please read the fire behavior forecast,” said Steve Ziel, a fire behavior analyst with the incident management team, at Thursday’s morning briefing. “It’s starting to look pretty epic; it may be a long saga.”
A warmer future
Fire has always been a part of these wetter forests, but climate change and human actions may make them more common.
Indigenous people managed portions of the Skokomish watershed with fire, to maintain and promote prairies and open habitat that would better support foods and medicines for people and wildlife, said Joseph Pavel, Skokomish Tribe natural resources director.
Eventually, as these burning practices ended, prairies in the area were either converted to other land uses or transitioned into forest land. Then came Smokey Bear and a fire suppression-focused U.S. Forest Service.
The impacts of fire suppression haven’t been as pronounced here as in forests shaped by frequent fire in Central and Eastern Washington. But mix in global warming, drought, an ongoing accumulation of fuels and more humans playing in these wild places, and you’ll get fires like Bear Gulch.
Climate change sets the stage for increased fire activity here. Raymond, with the fire research collaborative, said fire typically returns to these areas on the Olympic Peninsula every 200 to 1,000 years. These fires can also create opportunity, openings in the forest that give way to diverse plants and animals, Raymond said.
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The wetter, more productive forests hold a lot of fuel that builds up over time. In a particularly dry year, these wetter forests do burn, and there’s more to burn in every part of the forest.
This spring and summer were hotter than average and the summer has been drier than average, consistent with what’s expected from climate change.
But for very large fires to burn in Western Washington, a major wind must help fan the flames, Raymond said. And with climate change, there’s no clear shift in the frequency or intensity of major wind events, and thus no climate-driven increase in large west side fires, she continued.
Instead, climate change is likely to stoke more smaller fires, like Bear Gulch, driven by dry fuels and increased temperatures.
Skokomish Tribe Vice Chair Tom Strong said that especially with more people flocking to these places, visitors should take care of the land.
“I believe that the people who go up there, when they see the area, it’s sacred to them too,” Strong said. “There’s reasons why people return here. There’s reasons why people create social media around the offerings that we have here — because it’s special. The only way to keep it that way is to respect it.”
