(light music) - I've gotten word that there's a fire on our side of the river and it's moving pretty fast.

- And when we were here it was still pretty clear.

But all of a sudden those trees just blew up in flames.

(truck beeping) - The important thing at that point is who's still standing?

And how do we keep them standing?

How close were they being to burned up?

- [Radio] Fire watch 5-1, September 29th, 102 hours and we're over the Creek Fire on the Sierra.

- Well, wait a minute.

If lightning has started fires for millions of years who put those fires out pre 1850?

There was no fire departments.

- When you've got hot, dry windy conditions which is what drives the larger fires, and the larger fires make up almost all of the acreage that burns any given year, that is overwhelmingly driven by climate and weather and therefore climate change.

- If that's the case.

If we've got climate change and it's getting drier and warmer and all of that, shouldn't we manage the forests more?

Do we wanna still have all these devastating fires?

- [Jeff] And what do you say to people that say, oh it's just climate change?

- I don't think I can say that on camera, Jeff, because that would be bad words.

- Well, he sat there and he said, this will be the next big fire, right here.

He pointed, 'cause none of this had burned yet.

All of that had already burned.

And he said this will be the next big fire.

And sure enough it was.

- It's hard to see.

Coming up, we didn't see a lot of burned area.

But the folks on the other side of the mountain, they did and it's devastating.

- Too much fuel, too much brush, too much undergrowth.

Millions of dead trees that became torches.

- Well, the theory is once you've logged a forest, over the years you can't stop.

- I was not allowed to cut trees, no logging.

I was told you cannot log.

They made me almost sign that with blood and that of course, two months later I started cutting trees.

- [Jeff] Now I've always heard that the forest service had their hands tied by guys like you that wouldn't let 'em log beetle trees.

Is that untrue?

- They're lying to ya.

- Loggers know what the hell they're doing when it comes to cutting down trees.

They're not cutting down green trees.

They're cutting down dead trees.

They're cutting down diseased trees.

- Yeah, it was a pretty devastating day.

Calling my wife and telling her was, yeah, I don't wanna relive that.

- Until my dying day I will be on a platform advocating for good, healthy forest management.

- It's very, very sad.

It just breaks my heart.

The forest will never, ever in my lifetime return to what it was.

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(light music) - I have friends who run cattle on the other side of the river.

So we knew there was a fire.

My understanding was it had maybe had been a camp fire that had gotten away from someone.

I never, ever in my life woulda thought that it woulda jumped the river.

- Never seen anything like this in my life and I've seen two fires come through and never experienced this kind of a fire.

- [Jeff] Just the speed in which it moved.

- It moved.

It was fast, it was hot, and not a lot you could do.

- From where I'm standing at camp I can see Mile High.

Like part of it.

There's still a lot of trees, you can't see it very well.

But I can see smoke coming over Mile High.

And you know, 30 minutes ago that smoke wasn't there.

So I told 'em, I said hey, I'm seeing smoke at Mile High.

At that time he had told me, I had just talked to a really good friend of ours that runs cattle and they were over on Kaiser.

And he told my husband to call me and say, get out, now.

Like he watched the fire from Kaiser blow up and jump miles and miles ahead.

And he said, if there's anybody at Mammoth Pool you need to tell them to get out of there right now.

- My neighbor Gill Davis was sitting on his front porch and I asked him, Gill, aren't you leaving?

And he says no, we don't have to.

So we flagged down the Sheriff.

The Sheriff came over and got my name, my phone number, took my picture.

Asked me if I had any piercings, tattoos, scars or implants so they could identify my charred body.

- [Jeff] So that night when you looked at it over the point, you didn't sleep that night?

- No, I immediately got assigned to the fire.

And so I was there as a lookout.

I helped direct the crews in.

I know the area well since I've worked here for 30 years.

So, you know, I helped get the crews into the fire.

I did that 'til, oh, the crews got on site and at that point I switched into, you know, started to do some line scouting out for the divisions of firefighters that were out managing the fire.

And so I was assisting them.

Assisting Cal Fire in getting the dozers into the right spots and on the right road systems.

Getting gates open.

Pretty much did that until about 10:30, 11 o'clock the next day.

- Saturday afternoon I was down there hosing my back yard down and I was watching three, 400 foot flames go up Sheep's Thief Creek.

It sounded like a jet engine.

I was watching trees ignite before the flames even hit 'em.

It was just so hot.

- So I'm a forest and fire ecologist.

I have a PhD in ecology from UC Davis and I do research on wild land fires, essentially.

How they burn, what happens after they burn.

I'm the director of the John Muir Project and we're a small nonprofit forest conservation and research organization.

If a fire is close to a community, we should try to put it out if it can be put out.

So in other words, if the fire weather is low.

Which is the only time a fire actually can be suppressed.

But out in the forest, we actually have less fire now than we had historically, more than a century ago.

Before fire suppression.

We had less fire in our forests than we had for centuries and centuries, for thousands and thousands of years before we started putting out fires a century ago.

And so it's important to understand that because what it means is that when fires occur, including big fires, it's not a destructive event out in the forest, it's actually a restorative event.

It's ecological restoration.

- I so believe in good forest management that we humans are responsible for our forests.

Yes, we have messed that up and it's our responsibility now to fix it before we have more like the Creek Fire and the bark beetle infestation.

My academic training in forestry was strictly grow more fiber.

In those days the whole of forestry across the entire United States was focused on producing more wood.

Because we were still growing after the Second World War.

We were building houses like crazy.

Cutting down trees.

So, my whole education was based on growing wood faster.

- A lot of people assume that forests with a lot of dead trees and a lot of downed logs will burn much more intensely.

Because they assume that basically that's fuel, right?

That's the prevailing assumption.

And in fact, it made so much sense to so many people for so long that no one bothered to test that scientifically.

Here's what it comes down to.

It's really just a matter of physics.

When trees die, very, very soon after they die the dead needles and the small twigs, they fall and they decay into the soil.

And after that happens what you have there is basically something doesn't have much left to carry the flames.

There's not much kindling on the dead tree to actually make it burn and contribute to fire intensity.

What people don't realize is that mature, dead tree in the forest, it's kind of like that big log on the camp fire.

There's just not much kindling to carry the flames.

And then interestingly when they fall, when they're on the ground on the forest floor, they actually soak up and retain huge amounts of soil moisture.

- You will hear people say that dead trees did not, would not increase the fire risk or fire hazard.

Hogwash.

The reason we have mega fires now is strictly fuel.

Not only do those dead trees burn faster and hotter than green trees, they throw off huge chunks of fuel.

And we picked up chunks of burned bark and parts of trees that had been dead.

That would, they'd fall off.

You know, chunks fall apart.

All over this property here on the museum.

This fire jumped because of those dead trees and it jumped in one incident, eight miles.

- This is the third time Mom has been evacuated.

Either from her home or from our cabin.

And you learn to deal with it.

I'm not saying it gets easier but you figure out what you have to do.

And Mom actually had a list on her phone of things that we needed to grab from up here.

If we ever had to come and get evacuated.

So, she took the inside, I took the outside and we started grabbing things and these two old ladies loaded that truck so fast.

We got it done.

♪ Are we only half alive ♪ ♪ Embers drifting in the night ♪ ♪ Looking, wandering all the time ♪ ♪ We seek the kingdom♪ - So the Creek Fire started on Friday night out near Big Creek.

And it was fairly small, got up into the tens of acres.

By the morning it was in the hundreds.

By the next morning it was in the thousands or tens of thousands, I forget.

Then by Saturday night it was beyond expectations for us.

- I have a lot of animals.

I had three horses.

Between my friend and I we had eight or nine dogs and I had my son with me.

I was trying to prepare my animals.

I knew there was places we could go to be safe for a fire.

I just wanted to make sure I had all my animals.

That they were gonna be safe.

- When it came through our community, we have been training for it to come up the mountain from below.

Because that is always the wisdom has said is this is where it would come from.

The night of the fire, when it was coming close, when it burned through our community, I was above it because that's where the fire that night and that's where we were expecting to see it come through.

And it didn't.

It came across the highway over the side where nobody expected it to come through.

- Sitting at the store with my dad and my aunt's like, okay, I need to go tell some people to leave.

And we're like, okay.

She backed up in her side by side and went up on top of a hill.

Not a very big hill.

Just to kind of look out and see.

And she could see that the fire had jumped the sweet water.

So there goes our road out.

The fire is in front of us and the fire's behind us.

So she's like, all right, I'm going to tell people right now.

There was no way to drive out.

At that point it's, everybody get to the lake.

And so from that moment my dad and I jumped in the side by side.

My son was back at my cow camp with my friend.

And as we were driving out our campground, right before you go to cross the bridge, there's like a little camp spot right there, that camp was on fire.

And there was kids running around screaming.

I mean, nobody knew.

No one, those people had no idea there was even a fire.

We were out there.

Because my dad said, go out in the meadow.

It's grass, it'll be fine.

And so Peter and I were sitting right there, pretty much where that little black spot is.

And I'm like, we can't stay here.

We can't stay in this spot.

Because of the smoke and then there's flames everywhere.

And when you came back, my dad came back and saw us and said, we need to get to the pond.

And from right there to get to here, I couldn't see.

You could not see.

- You couldn't see from that black space to right here.

- From here, no, to here.

It was so smoky.

And I knew there was a tree and a rock but I didn't know exactly where I was.

- After that blew up, this mountain started on fire.

- [Ashley] Oh yeah.

- Like, five or six spots, all around us.

And probably within 20, 30 minutes the winds kicked up, I mean, 50, 60 mile an hour winds.

- [Jeff] They were blowing that hard?

- It sounded like a freight train going through.

(droning prop plane) ♪ The fallen, the crucified ♪ ♪ Will rise with the dawn ♪ ♪ Let the kingdom come ♪ ♪ This is not my home ♪ ♪ This skin and bone ♪ ♪ The daylight will raise to life ♪ ♪ The dead and the gone ♪ ♪ Let the kingdom come ♪ ♪ Let the kingdom come♪ - Well I mean, I've been concerned for a long time so you know my day job is as a forester.

I have responsibilities across California but my home base is here on the Sierra National Forest.

So, since the drought and the bug kill in 2016, I was super concerned about what might happen with a fire in this particular canyon.

And so the National Forest here, the Sierra National Forest initiated a project called the Music Project which was designed to prevent this very project.

And actually the day before this fire started the contract period for this project closed.

And so that, you know that project came about because of all the hundreds of tons of fuel of the hundreds and millions of dead trees that were in this canyon.

And so yeah, super concerned about what might happen.

You know, pretty much had gamed out what might happen in terms of a worst case scenario.

And this far exceeded any of those scenarios.

- We cannot let a political lines on a map or historic political parties points of view on this because we know the answer is right in front of our eyes.

- I've been across, I've seen the west.

I've seen almost every national forest in the west if not every national forest.

And this is by far the most pretty national forest.

Even burnt it's gonna be pretty, you know.

It has tremendous views.

It's got the granite.

It's just, you develop an emotional connection with it and it hits ya.

- There is the suggestion that there be logging and forest wood products that come back.

When you manage the forests with sustainable logging, there is a resource of money that can come back to those communities and come back to those forests and come back to those operations that not only hire people but have the resources to do an awful lot of the kind of clean up and the management within those forests.

- You know in those days we had a bank, we had a drug store, we had two doctors, two dentists, about five or six bars, three grocery stores.

- [Jeff] All in North Fork?

- All in North Fork.

Right in the middle of North Fork, you know.

And when the mill shut down in '93 we lost so much.

And I was on the school board then.

We also lost about a third of our kids and about a third of our teachers because we couldn't keep the teachers on.

So, there was a hard time hit for North Fork.

And we still haven't really caught up.

They had done all this study about how many board feet were cut, how many were growing, and how many died from natural and stuff.

So, that mill averaged about 100 million, 92 to 100 million board feet a year.

Just North Fork mill.

And they, the biggest year was 132 million board feet.

And that study, they said that the forest was growing, now get this, growing every year about 130 million board feet.

And natural death from bugs, you know diseases, old age or what have ya, 70 million were dying.

So when they were cutting 92 to 100 million board feet it was kind of like a balance.

It kept the forest balanced.

- There is a strong and emerging consensus among climate scientists and ecologists, in this country and around the world, that we need to start shifting away from logging and wood products to mitigate the climate crisis.

Just as we're shifting away from fossil fuel consumption.

What we know now is that logging is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

And it's a huge, huge contributing factor in the climate crisis.

- When the Creek Fire went roaring up out of Big Creek canyon on to Edison lands, it hit an adversary to fire.

And that is, there was no fuel.

I had prescribed fire, burned it for years.

The first time in the '80s.

So there was a tremendous fuel reduction.

And the fire ran up there and lo and behold, it stopped.

Because there was no fuel.

It wasn't that the climate change was on one side of the property line and the climate change wasn't on the other side of the line.

It was strictly fuel.

The winds were blowing on both sides of the property line, all that stuff.

So, the fire came up and just in essence laid down, jumped over the lands that Edison had been managing with prescribed fire and logging.

We had thinned those areas over the years several times.

Thinned it out so there was way less fuel than on national forest lands.

In the incidents where it's roaring other places.

The Big Creek Fire's going like crazy up the canyon.

Across cross winds.

It just was burning like a prescribed fire on Edison lands.

Mainly, well strictly, not mainly, strictly because of the amount of fuel.

(rushing wind) - [Jeff] What are we doing here?

What happened yesterday and why are we heading up right now?

- Well, we had a big wind event.

A mono wind event and we're gonna go check out the Beasore cabins just to make sure that no big trees fell on it, is what the plan is.

- [Jeff] Now, we did hear that a lot of trees went down here at Bass Lake and we know there's a lot of trees down on the Beasore road that we're going up right now.

- Correct, correct.

So, we survived the largest forest fire in history and hopefully we'll survive the mono wind event.

- Big old black oak.

(chain saw buzzing) - I didn't know what to expect.

I know we have some giant fir trees.

You know, could be 48 inch.

Could be a 60 inch fir tree.

But that would probably stop us.

But these small ones shouldn't be a problem.

You think I could pull all the way here, Johnny?

- [Johnny] Yeah.

- Yeah, so we're just moving down Beasore Road heading to the cabin to survey the damage.

We're obviously the first ones in because no one's been here before.

We're trail breaking right now.

And you never know.

It could be around the corner and get into another one of these big red firs that are 30 plus inches in diameter and then that's gonna slow us down a little bit.

But this is a sign of how much material is knocked down by this recent mono wind event.

And we're just looking at one little area that we can see.

This mono wind event hit the entire forest, the Sierra National Forest and more.

And so, we're talking about tons per acre of material that's down on the ground because of this event.

That could be fuel for future fires.

(chainsaw buzzing) - How about we do one at a time, people?

- Yeah.

- Heave ho.

- I'm gonna get this one, do this one.

- [Jeff] You know, one of the things that occurred to me as we were shooting this episode and listening to people like Chad Hansen and then Tom Wheeler, and John Mount is that it's possible that both sides of this debate are right.

You're talking about climate change.

Climate change is the weather.

The weather's gonna make it hotter and drier.

Which is gonna make fire behavior more active.

But fire can't burn unless it has fuel.

And so, we still need to sort out some of these theories about fuel removal and cleaning out a forest if that makes forest fires burn hotter or not.

If you come into a forest and do logging and thin the forest out aren't you limiting the amount of trees that can drop a lot of this stuff?

A lot of these trees have never, this area's never been logged.

And so, you have a lot of dead branches and you have a lot of materials that falls out of these older dead trees.

And they add to ground liter which adds fuel to the forest that could burn later.

So, it's an interesting debate.

And it's one that's not gonna go away anytime soon, I'm afraid.

But we all gotta wrap our heads around it, I know that.

(light music) (funky music) - [Announcer] Production funding for American Grown, My Job Depends on Ag.

Provided by James G Parker Insurance Associates.

Insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America by providing Ag financial services.

By Brandt, professional agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world everyday.

By Unwired Broadband.

Today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the central valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair.

Family owned for over 50 years.

Proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture, the families that grow our nation's food.

(dramatic music) (light music)