After the fires, massive cleanup underway

A long-awaited slowdown on the Bear Creek and Trail Creek fires has finally allowed Flathead National Forest workers to begin the monumental task of rehabilitating backcountry trails in the Spotted Bear Ranger District.

With the fall season at hand, they’re working under the added pressure of hunters clamoring to get into the popular game habitat.

Bow hunting is under way and the wilderness rifle season begins Tuesday.

The two fires that together covered nearly 100,000 acres in the Spotted Bear Ranger District affect 113 miles of trails, including some of the most-trafficked access points into the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

Located at the edge of the Bob and in close proximity to the remote ranger station, Meadow Creek Trailhead is the third-most-used access point to the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

In some places, the fires raged across the landscape, producing stand replacement burn patterns that wiped the landscape all but clean.

In others areas, a change in terrain or vegetation or a lull in the wind and other factors slowed the fire, producing mosaic burn patterns with relatively untouched pockets of green timber that will more quickly revegetate the area and continue to hold roads and trails in place.

Aaron Klug, the district’s trail specialist, said Thursday that the full extent of the infrastructure damage was still unknown, since trail crews had only just begun re-entering the fire areas to begin rehabilitation work.

“As far as burn severity, it’s mixed. We haven’t done reconnaissance on most of the 113 miles of trails. Right now we’re more concerned with the 13 miles up the east side of the South Fork Trail,” Klug said. “We’re putting all out guns out right now on the main accesses, but a lot of the side trails are going to have to wait until next summer.”

Outfitters, hunters and loggers are all anxiously awaiting the green light from the Forest Service, but fire spokesman Al Koss noted that the vast majority of those calling and visiting to get the latest updates have been understanding of the task ahead.

As the order of the day at Spotted Bear turns from fire suppression to trail rehabilitation, many of the roughly 100 fire personnel will head home, leaving a skeleton crew of Forest Service trail workers along with trail-experienced contractors from other agencies and organizations.

For burned areas around trails and roads, the first step is to identify and remove hazard trees — those that pose a risk of toppling onto routes or on those traversing them.

Outside the wilderness, most tree removal is done with chain saws. As mechanical tools, however, they are banned in designated wilderness areas, requiring two workers with a crosscut saw to tackle trees.

If a tree is already leaning too perilously, crews inside or outside the wilderness can use explosives to bring it down. But it’s not much of a time-saver since only certified blasting specialists can conduct the work and as a rule, all crew members must remain at least 300 yards away from the explosives when they detonate.

With the hazardous snags gone, crews will determine whether the trail itself will need rehabilitation. That can require digging out and re-treading the entire trailbed mile by mile.

“The more stabilization we can put in this fall, the less mitigation we’ll need in the future,” Klug said.

The job for the cash-strapped agency isn’t without precedent, however, and Klug said he’s drawing from his experience doing similar work following the massive wildfires of 2003 and 2007.

“That provided a pretty good background in how to do this on a larger scale,” he said. “It gives us long-term, 20/20 hindsight to look back on what worked and what didn’t, eight to 12 years into the future.”

For one, putting in the extra work the first time around can help avoid headaches down the road. As burned-out roots disintegrate below trails surfaces, miniature caverns are created as runoff flows around and under them. While they might hold for a group of hikers, a string of 1,000-pound mules could be a different story.

Klug added that another lesson came after the intense but much smaller Damnation Creek Fire in 2013.

“Without that vegetation on the hillsides, water can come gushing through those previously dry streambeds and wash out the trails,” he said. “We’ll really be on the heads-up for those kinds of events this fall and next spring.”

While the fires of 2003 and 2007 were arguably more intense, Klug said this year has been unique for how concentrated the burn area is over some of the most popular access points into the wilderness western side.

That said, district wilderness trails manager Richard Owens noted that the dozens of wildfires that  burned in Spotted Bear this year were spread out and only affected slightly more than 10 percent of the total trail mileage.

That might not be much consolation to the outfitters who depend on the Gorge Creek and Meadow Creek trailheads, but wilderness opportunities still abound for private hunters.

“The public needs to realize we’re doing everything we can, and we’ve got all of our trail people working on these trails,” Owens said. “A lot more is open than is closed.”

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.