How the forest is already recovering from the Yellow Lake Fire

On Friday, Sept. 27, 2024, a logging crew wrapped up a day of harvesting timber in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, putting their machinery to rest and heading home for the weekend.

It was a Friday like any other, though a little warmer than most, with a high hovering around 81 degrees in Heber by late afternoon, six degrees above average. But it had been a warm, dry fall statewide, nothing special to worry over.

The workers packed up their things and drove out of the forest, as they’d done every day, every week. Only this time a small fire had sparked and smoldered as they slept before fanning to life as temperatures rose 10 degrees over normal in the next 24 hours.

Accidental fires started by friction or sparks from logging equipment aren’t unusual, and crews usually catch them quickly. But this fire went through a dormant phase, barely detectable if anyone were there to notice. With this late-September’s perfect storm — no observation, high temperatures, low humidity and steadily increasing winds — that smoldering blaze whipped into 2,500-acre beast over the next few days, burning 33,041 acres by the time a snowstorm knocked it down for good Oct. 18.

Nine months later, the barren black-and-white landscape is bursting with new life, a vibrant green beginning to cover the charred remains of the fire. The new growth is exciting, U.S. Forest Service officials said, and no surprise.

“In general, when we do a prescribed fire, we try to do it for the health of the forest, and a lot of this is, would be like, ‘Man, if I could make our prescribed fires look like this, this is exactly what we would want,’” said Brook Chadwick, the forest’s fire, fuels & aviation staff officer. “We see fires like this all the time, and the recovery is pretty incredible.”

For Chadwick and his team, who led the attack on the blaze during the first 14 days, fires like the Yellow Lake Fire can be an opportunity for the forest to heal itself, reintroducing fire as a necessary reset that’s been absent for over a century.

Wildfire is not all good or all bad, Chadwick said. This case was pretty lucky — low impact to the soil, no lost structures, a mosaic burn pattern — all for a variety of factors. The Yellow Lake Fire Burned Area Report, released in December, showed that 86% of the burned area exhibited low or very low soil burn severity, 14% had moderate burn severity and less than 1% had high severity soil burns. 

Soil burn severity assesses the impact of the fire on organic matter that contributes to the ability of the soil to support vegetation. High burn severity can cause hydrophobic soil. That is, soil that repels water instead of letting it soak in.

“It can burn all the good biotics in the first several inches of the soil, and then it’s sterile for a while. So when rain hits it, there’s nothing left to hold it together, and then it starts to erode. And that’s really the problem,” said Chadwick.

With less than 1% — 41 acres out of 33,041 acres — with soil sterility, the chances of high vegetation recovery is all but guaranteed.

One possible reason for this healthy response is that the fire burned late in the season, said Deputy Fire Staff Officer for Fuels Riley Bergseng, who oversees and plans the national forest’s prescribed fires.

“Our burn windows are so hard and so tight because we want to burn in October, so having a fire like this in October — where it’s not July or August and just burning really hot — overall, a lot of it’s going to be a benefit for us,” he said.

A main benefit from this fire is for the aspen, said Utah State University Professor Brad Washa who spent much of his career fighting wildfire.

Washa explained that between the two types of aspen, seral and perpetual, seral aspen needs disturbance like fire to set it back and rejuvenate it. Otherwise it’ll be more vulnerable to encroachment from other species like mixed conifer trees.

Aspen is a keystone species, meaning it supports other plants and animals — wildflowers, forbs, shrubs, elk, deer, moose, birds — so it can be an indicator of the overall health of a forest. If aspen is in decline, the other species are at risk, too. 

“A mixed conifer stand of white fir and subalpine fir, from a wildlife benefit, there’s not a ton in that type of understory, whereas an aspen stand provides a lot more value to wildlife and more diversity,” Washa said.

These trees have evolved to survive fire by reproducing through the roots in a process known as regeneration, he said. Damaged or dying mature trees will trigger growth hormones to the roots, signaling a sapling. 

“I think some of these larger fires, actually, are going to be good for aspen, if it was present beforehand,” Washa said. “They’ve already got the advantage, because they’re starting from the roots, so you already got that root system in place that’s feeding the aspen, versus if a seed lands, it takes a while for that seed to get the roots put in place.”

The other benefit of a larger fire like the Yellow Lake Fire is that it can ease the impacts of overgrazing on young aspen sprouts.

“Sometimes you worry about, if you’re trying to get aspen in an area, that you’re going to get ungulate pressure from moose and elk and deer and cattle if there’s grazing,” Washa explained. “If you got a small area, it’s kind of like ice cream, they want to come to that area.” 

With aspen regeneration happening across a larger area, the young aspen have a better chance of maturing from the regeneration state to the recruitment stage, at about 5 feet tall or higher. 

Having more aspen on the landscape is not just for the health of other species. It can be a useful tree when facing wildfire. Aspen is considered a shaded fuel break, said Washa, meaning the fire-resistant nature of the trees can slow fire and decrease its severity. He pointed out areas where that happening in the Yellow Lake Fire — mature aspen trees black near the ground, but rarely caught on fire and “torched out.”

The conifer trees were much more flammable, especially those killed by beetles and left in a “red needle” state. 

Conifer trees in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, like much of the Wasatch Back, have been hit hard with rounds of beetle infestations, each bug host-specific as they attack the susceptible trees. Like the fir engraver beetle, which killed large swaths of trees during an outbreak situation five years ago, Washa said.

These bugs are more likely to attack weakened or stressed trees, attacking the bowl of the tree and preventing nutrients from flowing to the needles. Coming out of a 20-year drought cycle, many of the trees in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache were in a stress state, and the resulting dead, red needle trees were a big concern during the fire, Washa said. 

Chadwick said it’s been a recurring problem since he started with the Forest Service in 1994, gesturing to a stretch of forest along the road spotted with dead, standing fir trees.

“We logged it already once because of the beetle hit in the early ’90s, and then we logged it again several years ago, and then we still have dead,” he said.

One way they can remove the dead trees is through logging, selling plots to loggers in the area with a mix of dead and live trees.

“Dead trees aren’t worth much. If we want them to just come in and remove the dead trees, no one will ever buy it. It’ll just go unsold. So we have to mix some green with it so they can make some money. So it’s a benefit to get rid of some of the dead, but they also can make some money for the local economy by taking some of the green,” Chadwick said.

Of course, there’s always risk of sparking a fire such as the Yellow Lake.

Along with removing dead and fallen trees that are hazards near roadsides, suppression repair is another post-fire activity the Forest Service will do. Some of the damage that comes with fires like the Yellow Lake Fire is from the firefighting itself. In an effort to stop the fire from burning unchecked, and to protect structures like homes, responders cut and scrape firelines by hand or with bulldozers. Sometimes they hold, and often a going fire overruns them.

For hand lines, this is done by crews using Pulaskis or scrapers and can take even the most efficient crews hours.

When possible, bulldozers can move relatively quickly, pushing wide swaths through the vegetation. Where the terrain is too steep or rough for dozers, handcrews take over with chainsaws and handtools, clawing out line to mineral soil at a much more deliberate pace.

Bergseng said it’s not common to employ dozer lines in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache based on its terrain, but in this case there were 28.8 miles of dozer line, along with 15.8 miles of mixed construction line and 13.3 miles of hand line.

Sometimes the control lines did their jobs, stopping the fire’s path. Often, though the fire jumped the lines, pushed by wind and embers. Other lines were cut as backups that were never needed.

While the highest priority with wildland fire response is suppression, part of their work is repairing damage caused by suppression, said Chadwick.

“We focus all of our energy during the active fire, put fire out, put in control lines, and then we hurry and switch gears while we have everyone still there to try and rehabilitate those lines,” he said.

But because of the late-season fire, ending with a couple of snowstorms, only 84% of dozer line, 68% of hand line and 71% of mixed line was repaired before winter set in.

“You don’t want to make a situation worse by trying to get dozers and excavators into an area when it’s all muddy,” explained Washa.

So as soon as the snow melted and the ground dried up, the Forest Service ordered an excavator crew to start work on rehabilitating dozer lines, the main priority.

Jeff Sanocki, the fire management officer with the Ogden Ranger District of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, oversaw the dozer line repair work at the beginning of July, grateful for the 20-degree cooler weather, he joked.

“We’re not repairing necessarily the environmental impacts of the fire, but when you come in and you dig a hand line or a dozer line in this case, that is an impact that the suppression efforts did,” said Sanocki, a wildland firefighter in his 25th season. “We want to fix that before it becomes an environmental problem, whether that becomes a user created trail, road, route or has weeds in it, or erosion.”

Open dozer lines are also candy for off-roaders.

“What I’ve seen through the years, if you leave them all open, one thing, you’d have ATVers everywhere, which would have more ignition sources farther in the forest,” Sanocki said. “And then you’d have more erosion problems.”  

With repair work, the goal is to prevent user traffic — because the forest doesn’t need more roads, Chadwick said — and to prevent channeling, where water rushes down the cleared area and prevents vegetation from rooting.

Sometimes seeding is necessary when vegetation isn’t able to recover, but the natural response of this area seems to be doing well on its own, Sanocki said.

Both primary objectives are accomplished by putting the fallen trees and branches back across the area, making it impossible to drive on and creating natural barriers for water. The logs will be left to decompose on their own, and new vegetation will eventually grow in.

The cost of the repair work comes out of the fire suppression budget, Sanocki said, which on a fire like the Yellow Lake Fire was essentially a blank check. So they have more than enough funds to get the job done right.

The excavator crew drove down from Idaho for the job, a father-and-son duo who came last fall with their dozers for the Yellow Lake Fire. This job was a little more complicated, the operator untangling the mess of 40- to 50-foot aspen trees and dragging them horizontally across the road.

But for the most part, Mother Nature was already doing its job, Sanocki said. Where the dozer cut through a meadow, the line was already mostly healed over with yellow flowering arrowleaf balsamroot. Where the dozer cut through the aspen grove, the reddish-brown leaves of young aspen sprouts were already dotting bare soil.

Further in, the left side of the dozer line had scorched earth and burned trees, while the right side was still green and full — meaning the line worked and stopped the fire’s path. But there is still a cost.

“If you came back in even 50 years or 20 years, you probably won’t notice this fire was here, but you could probably pick out where there was a dozer,” Sanocki said. “Once you move the earth, it’s hard to really put it back the way it was.”

Overall, the natural recovery of the forest from the Yellow Lake Fire is remarkable, Chadwick said, but the evidence of the burn won’t entirely disappear in this lifetime. On one of the most high-intensity burn areas just east of Wolf Creek pass, what was once a stretch of evergreen needles is now a steep hillside of black sticks.

It’s an area where the fire burned hotter than anyone wanted, but just like the forest does, residents and visitors will adapt to the new landscape.

“We historically don’t get really large fires on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache,” said Bergseng. “It’s changed in the last 10 years. This is what’s the new normal, but it’s needed.”

It’s still early to see the full impact on the trees, said Washa, and some half-burned trees may still survive, while others will eventually fall. Some may be made available as roadside firewood collection or firewood permits.

Looking to a more fire-prone future, Bergseng said existing fire scars can be good news for firefighters.

“This is a good anchor point for us for future fires,” he said. “When we’re trying to figure out what to do with a fire, or where we can hang it up, or places to hold it, we come right back to these fire scars.”

Generally, it’s business as usual for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache’s Forest Service officials, who keep up with upwards of 9 million visitors annually across the national forest’s 2.2 million acres. Fires like the Yellow Lake Fire won’t stop that, and if anything, the effects of this fire — like burning away excess dead trees, rejuvenating aspen — are only improving the experience for campers, hikers, skiers and snowmobilers alike.

“Overall, when you look at all 33,000 acres, I’m super pleased and super happy that it burned the way it did,” said Chadwick. “I think we’re going to be just fine.”