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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2015 Baker City, Oregon
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Serving Baker County since 1870
Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com
EDITORIAL
urvivin The only statement about wildfires we can make with confidence is that they're unpredictable. Fires, in fact, have quite a lot in common with tornadoes. Both phenomena are dangerous and it's almost impossible to know where they will go. But fire is not a complete mystery, of course. We know it needs oxygen, heat and fuel to live. We can't do much about the first two ingredients. But we have some control over the amount of fuel. And one of the most valuable lessons from the Cornet/Windy Ridge fire, the 104,000-acre lightningsparked blaze that started Aug. 10 and is the biggest wildfire in Baker County history, is that people who live in rural areas where wildfires are more likely, can take relatively simple measures to increase the odds their homes will survive a blaze. Stices Gulch, the forested draw south of Baker City that's home to about 15 families, for about two decades has been the county's case study, as it were, for the concept known as "defensible space." The idea is that people who live in areas surrounded by fire-prone forests — and Stices Gulch certainly qualifies — can reduce the risk to their homes by minimizing the amount of readily combustible fuel that's close by. This typically includes such things as trimming tree branches that overhang the roof, rak-
ing pine needles and planting (and watering) grass or replacing shrubs with fireproof materials such as gravel. Many Stices Gulch properties epitomized the defensible space concept. Almost all of the homes were still standing aker the Cornet fire went through the
gulch. Fire experts say this was not a coincidence. The damage,as bad as itw as,probably would have been much worse had property owners declined to employ defensible space tactics. Stices Gulch is not unique in Baker County. There are hundreds ofhomes, in places such as the Sumpter Valley, the western edge of Baker Valley, and parts of Pine Valley near Halfway, in similar situations. The Oregon Department of Forestry
(541-523-5831) has ample information about how to create a defensible space. We hope property owners take advantage.
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oun is rea t o coor inate The County's position was reamrmed in 2009, when the commissioners passed Resolution 2009-1020. Unfortunately, the coordination process was never pursued by threeveryimportant areasofpower in the Commission at those times. the United States: the power to regulate Since then, we, the people of Baker interstate commerce, the military and County, havehad many ofourforestand the Federal Reserve. All other powers an. range access roads dosed, are having our reserved to the states respectively, or to livel ihoods threatened by thesagegrouse listing and have lost our forestindustries. the people, thmugh the 10thAmendment which states,'The powers not delegated to Miningis limited due to unwieldyregulathe United States by the Constitution, nor tions and lack of timeliness in processing pmhibited byit to the States, are reserved paperwork by the federal government. to the States respectively, or to the people." These events could have been, and can Itis important to have a fundamental be, prevented, or mitigated, through the understanding of the 10thAmendment coordination process. and the dual sovereignty that was reOur commissioners are now ready to served when the Constitutional convenengagethefederaland state agencies What is Coordination? tion wmte the powers that were to be through the coordination process. The pmThe"coordination process" as mandated given by the states and the people to the cess is not to incite conflict, butrather to by Congress is a process by which local central government. It was never intended create resolutions through plan and policy by our founding fathers to be an all-encom- consistency. With the 2015 Baker County government and federal agencies meetin orderto the"extentpracticable"to reach passing powerful national government. Natural Resources Plan in hand, the comconsistency between federal plans, policies The power to provide for the public safety, missioners can now step forward confihealth and welfare are historically left dentlyin representing the multiple users and acti ons and localplans.Oregon also of natural resources in an even-handed has coordination written into its Revised to the level of government dosest to the negotiating manner in a government-toStatutes. In other words, Baker County's people served. And this makes sense. Local governpolicie son naturalresourcesuseand government process. Ifyou would like more information on access, as set forth in the 2015 Natural Re- mentis dependent on revenue fmm the sources Plan, will be brought to the table taxbasetoprovideforpublicsafety,health the 2015 Baker County Natural Resources atthebeginrmg ofthefederaland state and welfare so must be involved in the de- Plan, the Natural Resources Advisory velopmentofplansandpoliciesthataffect Committee or on the Coordinating Proplan, policy and action-taking pmcess. the human and natural envimnments and cess, you can contact me at donibruland@ How did we get here? resources withinits jurisdiction. yahoo.com. In 2001 the Baker County Commission Remember your high school history? Doni Bruland is the chairperson ofthe The Constitution empowers and guaranadoptedOrdinance 2001-01 statingtheir Baker County Natural ResourcesAdvisory intent to coordinate with federal agencies. tees the federal government to manage Committee.
OnAug. 19 theBaker County Commissionapproved thedraft2015 Natural Resources Plan. The Natural Resources Advisory Committee voted unanimously the night before to advise the Commission to adopt the Plan as submitted. Itis with great anticipation that fmal adoption by the Commission will occur on Sept. 16 during the regular Commission meeting. Guidedby theprogressiveleadership of Commissioner Harvey, and supported by Commissioners Bennett and Kerns, this is ahugestepforwanl forBakerCounty.The Plan will allow our local government to enter into government-to-government dialogue with state and federal agencies. This process is formally known as coordination.
e racentu , The fire lookout is one of those rare analog anachronisms that remain useful in the age of the app. Vital, even. We have cameras in space that can peer through the Earth's atmosphere and focus on a single tree. We have airplanes that can scan a millio n acresofforestfor smoke in a couple hours. Yet none of our wizardry has managed to make obsolete the individual sitting atop a mountain, binoculars in hand and surveying the land rather like a raptor waiting fora carelessground squirrelto peek from its hole. The fire lookouts, as they have done for more than a century, not only are the first to report many fires, but they sometimes even see the lightning bolt that touched off the blaze. With the aid of a clever iand also antique) device called an Osborne firefinder, the lookout can usually pinpoint the spot for firefighting crews a few minutes after the first tendril wafts above the conifer canopy. Handheld radios and cellphones have replaced the copper wire connecting lookouts to ranger stations. And forest rangers, with rare exceptions, go about their work with four-wheelers and chain saws rather than horses and double-bit axes. But the lookout's main duty has not changed in any appreciable way
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DONI BRULAND
e r e o o outissti a e s o t
JAYSON JACOBY since the turn of the gast) century. There aren't many lookout buildings left, to be sure, compared with their heyday around World War II, when 1,451 of these diminutive structures capped summits in Oregonand Washington. I recently renewed my acquaintance with Mount Ireland, the oldestand highestoftherelative handful oflookouts that remain in Northeastern Oregon, which once boastedmore than 100 ofthese literal eyes in the sky. The current lookout atop the 8,346-foot foot peak, which caps the westernmost extension of the Elkhorns about nine miles northwest of Sumpter, isn't exactly ancient. The metal-and-glass building dates to September 1957, which makes it only slightly older than, say, Sputnik. A helicopter — and a stout aircraft it must have been, commanded by an adventurous pilot — deposited the structure on the peak's granitic summit. This building replaced a wooden lookout. By sheer coincidence I made the short iabout seven miles round-trip) but steepi2,300-footelevation gain) hike to Ireland's crest just one day after the 100th anniversary of a
much more significant journey to the top. iAlso a much longer journey, I'm sure, as the network of gravel roads surely had not been scratched so far up the mountain's flanks in 1915.l I shared the oxygen deprivation on the smoke-hazed morning of Aug. 29 with my wife, Lisa, and our friends, Meggan and Stuart Hills. Back home that evening I completed what's become a ritual whenever I visit a lookout — I slid from a bookshelf iafter a few minutes of fruitl ess searching) my dog-eared copy of Ray Kresek's "Fire Lookouts of Oregonand Washington." The 220-page book, which so far as I can tell is long since out of print but is available online, is the ultimate reference work about lookouts in the two states. But I recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in Northwest history, even those who haven't climbed to a single lookout, and don't intend to. Kresek crammed his book with amusing, and occasionall y tragic,anecdotes — thesortsoftalesbesttold around a campfire in the dark woods. Anyway, I turned to Kresek's description of Mount Ireland, which takes the whole of page 94 in my edition. About halfway down the page Kresek writes about the visitors' log at Mount Ireland. "Its original entry," he writes, "was August 28, 1915. On that day two iForest Service) employees,
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Charles F. Groom and C.C Davenport hiked up and established a 'rag'camp at the top ofthe peak." Kresek is silent on the matter but it seems to me likely that Groom and Davenport blazed their own trail to the summit that day. I doubt at any rate that the Forest Service — a mere stripling of an agency at the time, just a decade old — would have earlier built a trail to a remote peak for purely aesthetic reasons. I wondered which route the pair used, and whether it was even more taxing than the current trail. There's no mystery, though, as to why the Forest Service men picked the peak as a lookout. The view is expansive, taking in not only the nearby Elkhorns but also most of the North Fork John Day country to the north and west and extending south into Harney and Malheur counties. No summit is higher, in fact, between the Elkhorns and the Cascades. The mountain, on that day a century ago when the rangers climbed, was named Bald Mountain, which is generally accurate but not exactly original. Indeed Baker County had at least one other Bald Mountain then, the other being the lower, treeless summit on the divide between the Burnt and Powder rivers near the head of Denny Creek south of Baker City. iThe mountain is still bald but it's also black, temporarily, as the
Cornet fire scorched it last month.) On Jan. 25, 1917, the Oregon Geographic Board petitioned the federal government to rename the taller Bald Mountain as Ireland Mountain. The honoree was not the island but a man — Henry Ireland, former supervisor of the Whitman National Forest, which includes his namesake peak. Ireland died May 31, 1916. The U.S. Geographic Board approved the change, and at some point later the agency went with the current form, Mount Ireland, rather than Ireland Mountain. Name shifts notwithstanding, thepeak'sgreatestattribute— the view — remains as it has been since IceAge glaciersceased scouring the cirque on its north flank, where Baldy Lake lies today. And every summer thunderheads pile up to the southwest, towering over Dixie Butte and Vinegar Hill and StrawberryMountain and threatening to launch their incendiary missiles over the sun-dried forests. And every summer a lone figure peers through the heat haze, alert to trouble. Mount Ireland's caretaker the past six years is Andy Bayliss. He's a nice guy and quite an accommodating host. He'll even show you how to work the firefinder. It's not compatible with smartphones. Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.
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