3 Things Outdoor Recreationists Need to Know About Wildfire
In the past few decades, wildfire seasons have been getting worse—fires are larger, more severe, more expensive, more destructive, and more disruptive to our lives, especially in the west. Fire has a huge impact on outdoor recreation, damaging trails, climbing areas, and campgrounds. And post-fire landscapes often face secondary issues like erosion, flooding, and hazardous trees. Fires—or even fire danger—have caused land managers to close public lands, sometimes indefinitely. Even when a landscape isn’t directly threatened by fire, smoke from wildfires has become a huge problem for air quality in the west, making outdoor recreation unsafe through big swaths of fire season.
Click to read the report
Why have wildfires been getting so much worse, and what can be done about it? Today, Outdoor Alliance is releasing a policy report on wildfire and outdoor recreation, with two goals:
Help the outdoor community better understand the causes of catastrophic wildfire, and what can be done about it.
Generate support for policy reform in mitigating catastrophic wildfire, including a greater focus on prescribed fire and a greater investment in addressing fire’s impact on outdoor recreation.
Why Wildfires Are Getting Worse
If you’ve been following the news or political debates about fire, it can sometimes sound like two factions shouting at each other: one that climate change is the sole cause for more severe fire, and the other that forest management is responsible.
In reality, a series of changes over the past 150 years have dramatically altered the role that fire plays in our ecosystems, bringing the relationship between people, nature, and fire out of balance. First, the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands halted cultural burning, an important traditional cultural practice refined over millennia by Indigenous peoples.
Second, fire suppression policies by the federal government effectively removed fire from fire-adapted ecosystems across the country starting in the early 1900s. For many years, the Forest Service used a “10 a.m. policy,” where their goal was to completely suppress any fire that started by 10 a.m. This caused an unnatural build-up of fuels in our forests that increases fire risk over the long term. Third, logging practices that targeted larger, more fire-resilient trees and replanted trees too densely also increased the risk of severe wildfire. Development in fire-prone areas has also contributed, making it more likely that wildfires will burn down homes and other infrastructure.
Finally, climate change is rapidly changing the fire environment by making extreme fire conditions like longer droughts, extreme winds, hotter temperatures, longer fire seasons, and less snow, more common and less predictable. Combined, these conditions lead to more intense, more damaging fires, which in turn are harder and more expensive to suppress. These modern “megafires” threaten our communities, as well as critical ecological values like wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and water quality, that forests and other natural lands provide.
How Fire Affects Recreation
Recreationists experience the effects of wildfire firsthand. Our outdoor landscapes are also affected by fire. From 2018-2022, wildfires damaged or affected:
More than 23,750 trail miles
More than 1,360 climbing sites
More than 1,708 miles of whitewater paddling runs
While recreationists have to become comfortable with seeing the effects of some fire in their landscapes, extreme fires can also affect the scenic value of landscapes, often at a scale that likely did not occur historically—most people enjoy riding through a forest rather than among scorched trees as far as the eye can see. Fires can cause land managers to close public lands both pre-emptively and in the aftermath of a fire. Fire also threatens local economies, especially those reliant on recreation and tourism. As millions of people recently experienced on the east coast, wildfire smoke has become one of the greatest threats to air quality, making outdoor recreation unsafe for millions during the worst of fire season.
Because of their close connection to the land, outdoor recreationists can also be important advocates for better mitigation, treatment, and restoration from wildfires.
What We Can Do Now
The conversation around how best to mitigate increasing megafires has been polarized. There are, however, science-backed solutions for reducing the risk of megafires. These solutions will require support from the public, including the outdoor recreation community, and will need to take place across many levels of government and local communities.
Learning to live with fire requires a comprehensive approach that considers a full range of wildfire impacts—from urban areas all the way to our most remote wilderness. For example, local policies like planning and zoning laws—combined with investments in home hardening and defensible space—are needed reduce the direct threats to communities when wildfires occur. We also need to invest in updating powerlines and other key infrastructure in order to prevent unwanted wildfires from igniting in dry, hot, or windy conditions when fire risk is high.
On the broader landscape, and in areas directly around communities, fuel treatments like forest thinning and prescribed fire can help address the legacy of fuels from fire suppression and logging in order to reduce the severity of future wildfires. Fuel treatments have been shown to be successful.
Last summer, the Washburn fire burned thousands of acres around Yosemite, but spared ancient and giant sequoias in the Mariposa Grove (source). Foresters in Yosemite have been using intentional prescribed fire around the sequoias in the 1970’s, which prepared and protected the grove from a higher-severity fire. During the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon in 2021, more than 413,000 acres burned in extremely dry conditions with many areas of high-severity fire. Photos of the aftermath show a stark contrast between areas that had not been treated, areas that had been thinned only, and areas that had been both thinned and prescribed burned. When the fire entered one such area of Sycan Marsh Preserve, it dropped to the ground and burned at a lower intensity, reminiscent of historic fires (Source 1, Source 2).
Successful fuel treatment in the footprint of the 2021 Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon. Photo credit: John F. Marshall.
Severe wildfires are not an unsolvable problem. The recreation community can be an important partner for building the political and social support needed to ensure that wildfire management in the West meets the scale of the challenge, and incorporates important scientific and cultural perspectives. By harnessing our collective power, we can inspire the cultural and political change needed to protect the west’s forests and communities.
You can be a part of creating the political and policy change we need to change how we think about fire and take action to protect the West from megafire. Take action by signing a petition to the Forest Service to support more fire mitigation measures, funding, and policies to support fire recovery and public land reopening: