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(calm music) Five years later, the scars of the Creek Fire are still visible.

And for many who live in the mountains of Eastern Fresno and Madera counties, the memories remain just as raw.

The fire changed lives, landscapes, and an entire way of thinking about risk in the forest.

In part one, we asked a difficult question, what did we learn?

And more importantly, did anything actually change?

We saw progress in the air.

CAL FIRE expanded its response capability, adding larger, more powerful aircraft like the C-130.

We also looked at new firefighting technologies being used around the world.

Innovations that could reshape how we battle wildfire here at home.

But fighting fire after it starts is only part of the story.

The bigger challenge and harder work happens long before the first spark.

Forest management, thinning overcrowded trees, removing dangerous fuels, restoring healthier, more resilient landscapes.

It's slow, it's expensive and it's often misunderstood because much of this work doesn't make the headlines.

Today that work is expanding.

Foresters, arborists, contractors and local crews are working the ground every day.

Cutting, chipping, burning, and clearing.

New strategies are also taking root, including targeted grazing with goats and cattle, helping maintain areas that have already been treated, keeping fuels from building back up.

At the same time, the people who lived through the Creek Fire are still here rebuilding, adapting and watching closely to see what changes and what doesn't.

The reality is much of the progress happening in our forests goes quietly unnoticed.

Federal agencies, local fire safe councils and nonprofit partners are making gains but with limited resources and little time to tell their story.

Five years after the Creek Fire, the work is far from finished, but there are signs of progress and there are quiet soldiers in this fight, making a difference one acre at a time.

(calm music) - [Interviewer] What's going on over here?

- Well, they burn all those piles and they're half burnt and now that wood's even more vulnerable to the fire because it's dried out.

And I think it's all over on there though.

Well, here's some remnants of a burn.

When the Creek Fire started, I was up at my cabin at Arnold Meadow, replacing the batteries.

And then after that I took a good friend up to Joan's store for a burger and a beer.

And when I came home, my wife said, there's a fire up there.

I said, no, that fire is way down in Jose Basin.

I did hear there was a fire going, but it was miles and miles away.

But she goes, no, it's right in Mammoth Pool.

And so I grabbed my gear and went back up there and sure enough, it was, it moves very fast.

Never seen a fire behavior like that in my life.

And I've been around fire for 20 years, so.

- [Radio Announcer] Division Romeo on command.

- Nobody was up there.

It was, me and a fire hose pulled about 500 feet of one inch that I had around my cabin on a hose reel.

Hosed everything down and told this one old boy, he said, he's staying, Lenny Barker.

And I said, no, we're leaving, so I was the last one there.

We opened up the gates turned the pumps on and away we went.

- [Interviewer] And so you had to be thinking, oh man, my place isn't gonna make it, as you were following.

- I put my arms around and gave a kiss in the corner and said, it's time to go.

So took a lot of pictures on the way out and went up to the summit and that's when they were starting to bring some strike teams up.

About the third day, one of the battalion chiefs from up here, he went to my cabin from CAL FIRE and he said, hey, I'm at your cabin.

I said, oh man, he goes, it's still there.

And I go, you kidding me, he goes, yeah, we're using your one inch fire hose you pulled and hosed everything down.

So I did pretty much clearing on the whole property, park-like, trimmed all the bushes, raked, groomed.

So the fire actually went right around my cabin, like a laser beam.

I got pictures and document on that and it was amazing.

But unfortunately a lot of other people lost their cabins that they've had up there for years.

- The organization that I'm running, I'm an executive director of Eastern Madera County Fire Safe Council and we are private nonprofit organization.

So we do projects on both forest and land and state responsibility area, private land.

And what we're doing here regionally is we're trying to build like a comprehensive community protection plan.

And what that consists of is, you know, when you're looking at wildfire risk and within a community, you have to look at the entire scope of what the problems are and how to address them, which would be regional fuel breaks, shaded fuel breaks to protect the community through buffers and then get inside and work from the inside out at the parcel level.

- So when you have a disastrous fire like the Creek Fire come in with very high flame rates, right, intensity, that's gonna pretty much wipe out everything across the board, right?

It's almost like you're clear cutting the entire forest.

So it's more than just trees getting wiped out.

It's habitat for animals, plants, and you know, actual beneficial species such as elderberry and flowers and things like that.

So that actually will in return cause changes to the water table and our typical watersheds that we're used to 'cause the rate of infiltration into the soil is gonna be a lot different with less vegetation in there.

- So we don't work specifically through grants provided through passthrough organizations, although that's sometimes what we do.

But we work directly with the state and with the federal government and through larger organizations like Sierra Nevada Conservancy to private funders like PG&E, all that have the same goal of wildfire mitigation and reducing risk.

They use us as the passthrough to get the project onto the ground.

- [Jeff] Forest management in the Sierra isn't one system, it's a checkerboard, state lands, federal lands and thousands of acres of private property, scattered pieces that often sit at the gateway to the larger forests beyond.

Much of that private land is held by families, small land owners or utility companies, properties that may span hundreds of acres.

Land that plays a critical role in slowing fire before it reaches communities or before it moves into state lands or federal forests.

But many landowners don't have the resources, the equipment or the technical knowledge to manage it.

And that's where organizations like the Eastern Madera County Fire Safe Council come in.

Working often in the private land space, they help design and carry out large scale fuel reduction projects, often funding support from partners like PG&E and state grant programs.

But even here, nothing moves quickly.

Every project, public or private must navigate layers of planning, permitting, environmental review and approvals, paperwork, compliance, coordination across agencies.

The process can take two, sometimes three years before a single tree is thinned or a single acre is treated.

We are facing an emergency when it comes to wildfire risk and forest fuels.

But the system designed to protect the landscape often moves at anything but emergency speed.

So leaders like Ashley and her team have learned to work ahead of the system.

They identify high risk areas years in advance.

They build detailed treatment plans, they line up partners and priorities.

So when funding becomes available, they're not starting from scratch.

One of those ready to go projects lies just above Bass Lake along a critical corridor that leads into the high country and the surrounding Sierra National Forest.

Here on mixed private land, partnerships and preparation come together to move a major fuel reduction effort from paper to the ground.

And in today's Sierra, that kind of readiness can make all the difference.

- A lot of people when we're talking about wildfire, assume that there's money available through the state.

Let's go implement a project, let's clean up the forest when essentially that would be a state responsibility area response to a federal problem.

And that's not the way we operate.

The state of California, for example, has no sort of authority over federal lands.

Although we do subsidize projects by funneling money to assist with projects on federal land.

We do not have the authority to create this change that we know is needed through the state.

So the feds organize and respond and implement projects through a federal authority process.

The state has different processes, there is overlap and if you're using state funding to implement a project on federal land, you're gonna have to follow environmental regulations for not just the state but also for the federals.

There's many, many layers from the process of identifying a need to understanding how to address that need with say pre-fire mitigation.

And then from that point you've got maybe a beautiful project built out, you know where you wanna place it.

Then you're walking into like, okay, let's figure out how we're gonna get this funded.

Let's figure out what environmental background work needs to be done.

That comes first before the actual project funding.

And at that point you have deadlines and all funding for projects is competitive and it's targeted.

So saying that there's a pool, say for Prop 4 or CCI grants in the state of California to do fuel work, it does not mean you get fuel work and then you place that fuel work wherever you like, that funding pots, they're targeted.

So some will go towards reforestation, some will go towards watershed, some will go towards WUI which is Wildland Urban Interface Protection Plans.

So you have to have projects developed that are responsive to the funding that is available.

- You know, it takes a village really for these projects to get done, right.

We wouldn't be able to know where a lot of the priority regions are without working with our collaborators at CAL FIRE for our region.

For Merced, Madera, Mariposa Union.

And we have been astounded and very thankful for our partnership with the fuels management team at PG&E for their willingness to actually create projects in our region for fire safety.

Of course we have connections with the Sierra Nevada Conservancy as well.

We've got projects in the pipeline through them, through CAL FIRE and of course our local regional nonprofits.

The Yosemite Sequoia Resource Conservation Development District, (indistinct) RCD, Yosemite Gateway Prescribed Burn Association.

It's through all of those partnerships that we have with local organizations and stakeholder organizations that allows us through our Fire Adapted Madera County Collaborative to actually figure out the most direct way to implement fuel reduction projects across the county as a whole.

And it really takes a village to get stuff like this done.

- Well, Edison land, most of the activity has taken place.

They did all the salvage, logging right away, I think harvested almost 80 million board feet off of the area that had been burned, cleaning it up and getting it ready to plant.

Now on the other hand, the Forest Service has an entire different process.

They have to do a tremendous amount of work preparing the ground for plantations.

So the 800,000 or 400,000 acres on national forest, just a few, relatively few acres are being managed.

They haven't even taken care of all the tremendous erosion because the fire damaged the soils.

And so there was a tremendous amount of erosion.

They said about $80 million in erosion.

So there's many roads are still not fixed around the Sierra National Forest.

- [Jeff] Just up Bayshore Road from the fuel reduction treatment recently completed by the Eastern Madera County Fire Safe Council.

Another fuel break project has been partially conducted by the Sierra National Forest.

The contrast between the two treatments is stark.

Ashley and Kevin's work is clean, tight, and looks purposely manicured.

The Forest Service job looks different than that.

Less of a park-like setting and more of a utilitarian approach.

All right, so Steve, we're up on Bayshore Road right now and this is the Forest Service section.

Their fuels reduction project that they did.

And this is, I think this is what pisses everybody off are the piles that are left here.

- These are big piles right here.

And we're within a quarter mile from the township of Bass Lake.

One of these piles goes up, is gonna go bing, bang, boom and take 'em all out and go right into Bass Lake.

- [Jeff] Well, I guess, I mean when you look at, let's take a little walk and look at what they did here.

So what they've done is they've gone in here and cleared a lot of the ladder fuels and a lot of the ground.

- Which is good.

- [Jeff] Which is good, you need that done.

And, but then what happens, and I think this is what's puzzling for a lot of people, is they pile this stuff up and it sits here for how long has this stuff been here?

Like almost a year now.

- Over a year, yeah.

You know what, if you start a project, finish it.

And this is what you get.

I mean we wanted this and it's unfinished job.

Finish it up, you start it, finish it, from start to finish and be done with it.

Everybody loves Forest Service, if they did their job properly, they're here to manage the forest.

And I don't see it being managed right now.

The way I would manage it if I was in charge, you know, if things change, technology, you know, better equipment, they just need to pay attention to the people that are telling 'em what to do.

They don't want to do that 'cause they're the boss and they're gonna do it their way.

- [Jeff] Oh, when you see this patch, this side, Steve, what are you thinking here?

This is a pretty good pile.

- It's a good pile.

I do a lot of burning around my property.

This goes off, you're gonna see it from outer space, I guarantee you.

And then it'll go from that one to that one to that big pile to these dead trees, to that dead snag.

And you'll be on national news.

And we don't want that around Bass Lake, believe it or not.

- We drive this road all the time in the summertime, all seasons of the year, really.

And you know, when I first saw this, this project being done, I was like, heck yeah man, this is cool because.

- I was excited too, Jeff.

- They're all excited and the the biggest thing that we are as cabin owners and even if you don't own a cabin, even if you love coming to the high sierra, you love going to Jones' store for a burger or you love going to Chiquito Creek or you like going to Jackass Meadow or you want to go to the Ansel Adams Wilderness up on top, when you see this, this is a good sign because the thing that's gonna start a fire on this corridor, this Bayshore Road corridor is gonna be someone stupid that down at Bass Lake and it's gonna be someone not from Bass Lake being stupid at Bass Lake that's gonna start a fire.

The summer winds go right up this canyon.

And so this will slow fire down.

But as Steve said a minute ago, finish the job.

Or at least maybe tell us why you can't finish the job.

- Well Jeff, the biggest thing here too, as we're all up there, this is our egress road out of our cabin.

This is the only road getting outta there.

And this is gonna stop our egress if there was a fire.

- I guess what it comes down to is like communication.

Like, you know, we live here and I think the Forest service sometimes forget they work for us, they forget.

- Absolutely.

- They forget that they are servants to us.

- The taxpayers.

- The taxpayers, that's it.

That there's no other interpretation for that.

And we get along great with the Forest Service people that we know up here.

But when it comes to a project like this.

Maybe it was, were you notified as a Bass Lake homeowner that this was going on?

- No.

- Was there any communication between the Forest Service and the people?

- I talked to old supervisors of our county and they said, oh, they'll get to it.

They'll get to it.

Well when, you know, like my grandfather said, you start something, finish it or don't start it at all.

- A hundred percent.

But just giving people a heads up as to, hey folks, we cleaned up, we did this project, here's our plan.

The piles you're gonna see for X amount of time, we're working our best to get more funding to, or whatever it is.

- This project's dead in the water.

I don't see it happening, not this year.

- And if it's environmental lawsuits that are blocking the finishing of this job, tell us that too.

You know, just start telling us on the flip side of that, there's a lot more to all of this than you and I know.

And I get that, and that's part of the problem.

That's part of my point is well let us know so we can be on your side with this.

- What's the most important thing on any fire if you're a fireman?

Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Make sure your orders are clear and understood and there's nothing clear and nothing's understood around here.

Is this a mess, it needs to be cleaned up.

- [Jeff] After part one of this special was produced, I again reached out to Sierra National Forest Supervisor Dean Gould, for an interview on this fire break project and more generally to learn what the Sierra was doing differently after the Creek Fire regarding forest management.

This time Mr.

Gould wrote me back but stated that all questions of him would have to be submitted in writing ahead of time and would need to be pre-approved by the USDA.

American Grown did not agree to these conditions for this episode.

- So regionally we haven't used a lot of grazing, but what grazing does is it is a maintenance, you know, it's, you know, maintenance piece of the puzzle.

You know how to keep fuels down year round.

We're actually developing a grazing protocol for Eastern Madera County that can be used on private lands and on the SRA and if need be, moving into forest land.

When you're doing grazing, you also, it is species specific for targeted outcomes.

So you wouldn't get in here with some grazers and expect to have ladder fuels removed.

You need browsers for that, so it's very species specific.

So what we're trying to do is develop the model for the profiles of the fuel and what that targeted grazing looks like.

So it's gonna be different at different areas.

- [Jeff] Are you talking about using different animals?

- Yes, absolutely.

- [Jeff] So what's a browser versus a grazer?

- A browser would be a goat, something that likes to climb.

It will eat almost anything it sees with, you know, very finite exceptions.

They're happy to take down lots of ladder fuels.

What browsers can do on a large landscape scale that we can't do with machine access.

Think about the slopes over there where the Creek Fire went in and out.

You're not gonna get machine equipment down there to do mitigation, but guess what, a goat's happy to crawl down there and get into your ladder fuels, eat 'em up.

If you're talking about seasonal flashy fuels and keeping down that fine fuel, which is our grasses, which catch rapidly and they really spread wildfire into the canopy, keeping those down, that can be handled by the grazer.

So that's a different species.

So what we're trying to do is take all of these methodologies for prescribed herbivory and translate them into a way that we can actually put projects on the ground, very targeted projects on the ground that will hit different fuel models.

So whether it's a grassy fine fuel or whether it's a chaparral type of environment or whether we're talking forested woodlands, we will have an answer to that with a targeted prescribed herbivory.

- The forests have always been kind of managed anthropogenically, right?

By humans, right, I mean Native Americans for thousands of years living up there, intentionally set meadows on fire 'cause they knew that years later, they would have blueberries in the meadow, that kind of stuff.

So there's an argument to be made that it was never natural, right?

As at least as long as humans have been around.

It's important to realize that it is all connected, right?

In terms of sustainability.

Sustainability looks at managing people, planet and profit, right?

So in terms of jobs down in the valley, that are maybe more ag related, most certainly they would benefit from sustainable natural resource management practices up here, right?

In terms of watershed healthiness, right?

In terms of managing flood runoff, sediment erosion, all that stuff is all connected to basically the plants that are actually on the ground within the watershed.

There's a couple of different schools of thought in terms of environmental management.

There's of course, you know, the preservationist side, which kind of started with John Muir and that is kind of the National Park Services kind of thought process behind a lot of things.

It's more preservationist and then Gifford Pinchot, right?

One of the first heads of the Forest Service, he was more about utilitarianism, right?

What can the land do for us, how can we use it?

And I think that the best forest management and natural resource management plans use a little bit of both, right?

It's important to preserve said resources so my kids and their kids and their kids can have something there, right?

To sustain themselves and have the fresh water, have the recreational resources.

And of course it's all connected.

You know, air quality, all of that.

It's all connected to forest health.

And the most successful land and environmental managers that I've worked with have been willing to learn from everything, right?

And they're not just preserving, they're not just conserving, they're not just, you know, using the forest for resources.

It's a little bit of everything.

But the research has shown from UCANR, from UC Davis that for our specific forests and typical historic fire regime up here, that it is at an unhealthy level in terms of being stocked right now.

And actually actively managing by intentionally removing fuels and doing intentional burning is one of the best ways to kind of restore the overall sustainability of the forest as a whole.

I think, yeah.

- [Announcer] Production funding for American Grown provided by James G. Parker Insurance, protecting agribusiness in the valley for over 40 years.

Brandt, professional agriculture, discovering, manufacturing and supplying the ag inputs that support the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural central California.

Keeping Valley Ag connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, trusted by builders to wire thousands of valley homes.

Now bringing that trust direct to you.

By Wawona Frozen Foods, fruit as it should be.

Family owned since 1963.

By Harris Farms, a legacy of growing.

By Harrison Co., providing family farms insight to make the best possible financial decisions.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family owned for over 50 years dedicated to supporting valley agriculture and families that grow food for the nation.

(dramatic music)