Land acknowledgement: I recognize that all burning and learning during this week of training in the Klamath Mountains occurred on unceded Karuk land. The Karuk people brought good fire to these mountains for thousands of years prior to colonization. Despite over a century of intense fire suppression efforts by the U.S. government, the Karuk people continue to use fire for both land stewardship and cultural practices today. It is the Karuk people’s intimate knowledge of this land and what the land is asking of us now in the face of climate change that must be honored and uplifted as a guiding light for land management in the Klamath Mountains.

I have spent nearly all 25 years of my life in California under the ever increasing threat of unprecedented wildfire. For much of this time, I understood any fires larger than small beach bonfires as exclusively just that: threats. This misconception was largely the result of my public school education nested within a settler colonial culture of attempted erasure of indigenous culture and national pursuit of misguided fire suppression dating back to the early 1900s. As a child and young adult, I had no idea how integral fire is to the land’s wellbeing and culture of so many.

My own understanding of fire has thankfully come to shift over recent years. At the same time, I’ve become more aware of the tide turning on a larger scale, albeit slowly, as much of what Smokey the Bear embodies has come under sharp criticism and controlled fire is being returned to lands that desperately need it. My week of burning in the Klamath Mountains was a tangible and powerful shred of insight into what fire can do for and mean to those wielding it.

A group of other two other GrizzlyCorps fellows and McConnell Foundation employees at the starting line of their pack test. Notice they are wearing 45 lb vests!

Since these trainings aren’t widely known, I want to describe them briefly here. TREX programs are platforms for two things: the exchange of knowledge on prescribed and cultural burning and physical implementation of burning practices. And so follows the acronym(esque) term TR-EX, short for training exchange. All TREX participants partaking in fire activities must hold firefighter Red Cards, so they complete the same training as does any wildland firefighter. This training includes over 40 hours of online courses in wildland fire suppression and the Incident Command System. The final steps to earning a Red Card are finishing a physical pack test, which entails walking three miles in under 45 minutes carrying 45 lbs, and successfully deploying a ‘fire shelter’, a reflective aluminum covering that is intended to shield the body from fire in emergency situations. Throughout the month of October I completed the online training, and from November 8th through 12th this Fall, I joined the final Klamath TREX cohort of the 2021 for five full days of ‘good burning’.

We met Day 1 at the Klamath Siskiyou Art Center in Happy Camp, CA for a cold morning of introductions and briefings. Being that Klamath TREX is an interagency cooperative including the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC), the National Forest Service, the Karuk Tribe, privately contracted burn crews, and many others, this lengthy welcome had most of us both smiling and shivering by the end. After completing the pack test and shelter deployment, I was cleared for fire activities and only still needed my Nomex, heat and flame resistant clothing that nearly all firefighting gear is made of. I was loaned a shirt and pants designed for a stereotypical 6-foot male firefighter, both of which were laughably oversized for my 5’0’’ female frame. I was nevertheless very grateful for them.

Morning briefing at National Forest Service office in Happy Camp, CA.

On Days 2 through 5 our big group settled into a routine. We met every morning at the Art Center for coffee and a hearty breakfast and together walked over to the Forest Service Headquarters for a daily briefing. Everyday we were warned that conditions at the burn sites, referred to as ‘burn units’, were dangerously steep and slick due to high relative humidity and recent precipitation. This year, a devastatingly hot and dry summer with the McCash Fire coming very close to the town of Happy Camp was followed by roughly 12 inches of rain to the area we were burning. Day after day of slipping up and down mountainsides attempting to light piles of soggy forest material reaffirmed these safety warnings were justified.

Following the morning briefing we loaded into cars and caravanned up a windy mountain road about 40 minutes south. This drive always had me shaking my head in awe at the sweeping views of fog gently blanketing the tree-lined slopes and crevices of the valley. As soon as we arrived at the units we quickly unloaded, geared up, and reviewed the day’s plan in our six-person burn crews.

Sabrina, GrizzlyCorps Fellow, attempting to light a burn pile with a drip torch.

Each day our crew was tasked with either ‘lighting’ or ‘chunking’. Lighters set fire to 4-5 foot piles with drip torches and propane torches. Chunking crews retraced the steps of lighters with tools in hand, shoveling all debris that had not yet been consumed onto the hottest parts of the fire. Heat did not easily spread throughout the rain soaked piles, making chunkers essential for sufficient fuel consumption. While the novelty of carrying a flame thrower never really wore off, I was equally invested in throwing old logs and broken tree limbs into the flames.

During our hours of burning, I couldn’t follow normal indicators of time passing. The fog and smoke created a thick layer between us and the sun, so we couldn’t track its movement across the sky. Instead, growing fatigue in my body and the light sloshing of almost empty fuel canisters tipped me off to the hours that passed. Despite this hazy chronology, certain moments and sensations are clear in my memory. I remember breaking for lunch on a particularly steep slope, seated against a ponderosa pine as ash rained down and smoke infused my PB&J. I remember squatting down to stick my torch into the base of a massive burn pile and rolling backwards down the steep slope when gravity won out against my own body weight and the 20 lb propane tank strapped to my back. I remember slipping countless times down into soft leaf litter, each time finding a new mushroom or plant to later identify. I remember static-laden radio communication filtering through the snapping and crackling of burning piles. I remember the sweet scent of burning incense cedar mixing with the tobacco smoke of firefighters resting nearby.

Smoke filling the air as fuels are consumed by the fires.

I hope to bring this burning experience back to our work here at Shasta Land Trust. At one of the Land Trust’s recently closed easements, there is a prescribed burn scheduled for late Spring 2022 once fuels have hit their burn window sweet spot: dry enough to catch fire but not to the point of creating unintended wildfire. Beyond this opportunity, I hope to incorporate burning practices into land management plans for future protected properties. And, I hope to be involved in prescribed fire projects down the road within my own communities.

Maybe counterintuitively, much of my learning during TREX is better framed as unlearning. All of the lighting techniques and burning strategies and weather updates and critical radio communication shared with me throughout the week further unraveled my understanding of fire as a straightforward tool for land management. Prescribed fire is an intricate dance between many climatic, ecological, and human factors that I have only begun to understand superficially. The exchange of tired smiles and laughter that carried up and down the mountainside and mutual interest in and respect for the forest as we burned piles dissolved my misconception of prescribed fire as a uniform, rather unemotional practice and replaced it with a fuller picture of what it can be, at least in this very specific region of far Northern California: the physical, mental, and emotional toil of bringing fire back to the land by individuals with deep respect for both fire and the forest.

I do want to clarify that my reflections until now have centered the prescribed burning aspect of TREX. Although the Karuk Tribe’s cultural burning practices were not at the focus of the training, there were bits of this knowledge shared throughout the week. One member of the Karuk Tribe leading our crew explained how tossing glowing hot coals onto the base of hazel trees spurs new growth. The soft, but durable new limbs can then be harvested and used for basketry by Karuk basketweavers. This practice, he explained, is thousands of years old.

Several leaders of TREX including two Karuk burn crew leads and two individuals from Mid Klamath Watershed Council talking on a ridge.

As a white, nonindigenous woman questioning what, if anything, I might do with knowledge like this and how I might respectfully move forward with the use of fire for land stewardship, TREX gave me the beginnings of an answer. The Karuk burn crew was present and participatory each day of training. The white leadership opened and closed the week with acknowledgements of the Karuk’s ancestral sovereignty over burning practices. The history of colonization within the Klamath Mountains was addressed and condemned. Several white leaders voiced their trauma associated with unprecedented wildfire and contextualized it within the U.S. government’s century-old forest mismanagement and grossly punitive treatment of native peoples who continued to bring fire to the land. One supervisor in particular, his delivery both earnest and deferent, told us about the Karuk burning practice for basketry, a piece of knowledge he had learned through years of forestry work alongside the Karuk Tribe. In essence, this week showed me what it can look like to be an ally to true stewards of ‘good fire’.

My deepest gratitude to all coordinators and participants of Klamath TREX.