Cowiche landscape burned, not burned out

COWICHE — It took years to secure and turn Snow Mountain Ranch into an 1,800-acre haven for hikers, mountain bikers and nature lovers. Reducing most of it to a charred moonscape only took days. Hours, even.

A June 21 photo taken at the east junction of the Bench Loop Trail and the Cowiche Mountain Loop Trail, roughly 11?2 miles from the Snow Mountain Ranch entry kiosk behind which the fire is believed to have originated. (Photos courtesy of David Hagen)

Last month’s human-caused Cowiche Mill Road Fire replaced sagebrush, native grasses and trail systems with blackened ash over roughly two-thirds of the ranch. But the blaze hasn’t darkened the optimism of those charged with maintaining its natural splendor.

“It kind of hurts your feelings as much as anything,” said Curtis Sundquist, board president of the nonprofit Cowiche Canyon Conservancy, which in 2005 purchased the property with $1.1 million in grant money and a lot of assistance from public and private partners. “It’ll take quite a few years for it to all recover. A lot of the sagebrush up there was pretty ancient.”

Fire officials believe the 6,200-acre fire began on Snow Mountain Ranch — just behind the kiosk near the main entrance, in fact — and two fire-protection agencies have combined to offer $10,000 for information leading to the arrest of whoever started it.

But although as much as 1,400 acres of Snow Mountain Ranch burned, the area’s creekside vegetation was left largely unscathed and natural post-wildfire regeneration has already begun.

A July 31 photo taken in the same area, following a July 18 fire that burned 6,200 acres in the area. (Photo by David Hagen)

“In many ways, this is good news,” said Betsy Bloomfield, Conservancy executive director. “On a very, very human scale, no one was killed or seriously injured. No major structures were lost. No major agri-cultural infrastructure was lost. What we got instead was a big wildlands burn.

“In our part of the world here in Eastern Washington, we would expect to see natural wildfire in these shrubsteppe ecosystems on an interval of between 30 and 70 years, and it had been about that long (since the last wildfire in the area).”

Wind pushed the fire south and east from its genesis behind the entry kiosk, leaving the kiosk itself untouched by flame. Signs directing hikers and bikers around Snow Mountain’s 9.2 miles of trails, much of that snaking up and over Cowiche Mountain, also survived the blaze.

“What’s amazing is we did not lose any trail signs,” said Conservancy board member David Hagen. “Sometimes it burned the post and that fell, but then the fire moved on and the sign survived. We lost some old-growth sagebrush — some taller than I am — and those won’t be back anytime soon. We’ve lost that. But the grasses and the wildflowers, they’ll all be back next year, maybe better than before.”

Thanks to Hagen, the Conservancy has access to a remarkable pre- and post-fire photographic record. A month before the fire, Hagen and Kristen Winter, a graduate student working in Central Washington University’s geographic information system (GIS) lab, had made a photographic tour of Sun Mountain Ranch, using GIS mapping technology to chronicle each location.

The Balanced Rock at Snow Mountain Ranch following a July 18, 2010 fire which scorched 6,200 acres in the area.

Their intent was to be able to upload the photographic data onto Google Earth, thereby allowing Internet users to take a virtual tour of the site. Now, it will also give the Conservancy and others a scientific tool to study wildlife fire and its ecological impacts.

“Now we have this perfect set of these photographs,” Bloomfield said. “We will set up a five-year, post-five monitoring survey, see how the landscape changes after fire, what birds come back, what animals come back, what plants come back, what doesn’t come back. So we’ll learn a lot from this — what kind of restoration techniques work, and how to plan for the future.”

The primary post-fire concerns are threefold, according to Bloomfield. The first is the potential for invasive weeds establishing a foothold in the most highly-disturbed areas. Then there are the wide fire breaks designed to contain the fire spread have inadvertently “created a potential superhighway for the off-road vehicles that can really damage areas.” And, finally, nearly three miles of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife elk fence burned in the fire, opening up nearby fruit orchards to marauding elk.

Other public and private entities — the Audubon Society, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, Bureau of Land Management, North Yakima Conservation District, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — have offered to help the Conservancy in the aftermath of the fire. Their participation might include mapping the extent and severity of the fire and reseeding highly-disturbed areas with natural bunch grasses.

A photo taken in the spring of 2010 photo showing the Balanced Rock at the Snow Mountain Ranch.

There’s also the possibility of erosion, especially in the areas that burned the hottest, an event that could impact the gains made in the South Fork Cowiche Creek. Since the 2005 purchase, the Conservancy removed a dam and diversion channel built for irrigation purposes in hopes of restoring natural fish runs. Those hopes were realized last April when a WDFW survey found 10 steelhead egg nests (redds) and three adult steelhead in the creek bordering Snow Mountain Ranch.

“We weren’t sure if we would even have visibility to (see the redds and steelhead),” said WDFW fish biologist Eric Anderson, who oversaw the April survey. “We just happened to hit it just right. This was along about a mile-long reach that borders the ranch, so there’s likely more redds above that point and more redds below that point.

“The fact that the fire didn’t burn down into the riparian area is a great thing. Unless we have a huge snowmelt spring runoff this following year, I would think a lot of that area will grow back pretty quickly.”

That’s just one more reason for optimism among the people responsible for turning Snow Mountain Ranch into a destination for recreationists.

“I see a lot of good coming out of this,” Bloomfield said. “We have a wakeup call, and we’ll have a road map toward what we need to do (in the event of) future emergencies.”