Catch Up #5 - Flows and Fires -

In this adventure of bearing witness to a decade in the forests, I have run into a challenge.  On the one hand, I have invited you to join me in catching up on events and changes experienced between 2020 and 2025 and it feels important to make good on that.  On the other hand, if I am not careful the tales told run the risk of reading like a depressing succession of tales of accelerating woe.  And who wants or needs that?  Since I don’t, here’s the compromise plan – I will share condensed distillations of three tales into this update;  should you want additional detail, I am happy to provide it.

Between 2020 and 2025 we have experienced changes in one of our three forests that are unprecedented to us.  They concern the flows – or lack of flows – of water and the role of wildfire in our immediate region.  Though these changes align with the types of changes that scientists indicate could be experienced and anticipated linked to human impacts on the atmosphere, my family and I feel that it is important to not jump to conclusions about what’s driving these changes.

High Flows - Roads play an important, valuable and easily underappreciated role in the life of a working forest.  When they are designed, built and maintained well, they support the flow of human activity through the forest as well as the downslope flow of water and the special life that depends on it.  Vehicles, logs, etc. over – living waters under.   When the volume and power of the water exceeds the capacities of the road systems to handle it, serious problems often come quickly.  As Fall brings the transition from the dry season to wet, we annually inspect and prepare the systems for what we know is coming – culverts are checked and cleared, water bars are refreshed to direct water off of the roads.  We do this with the hope that the pressures on the systems will not exceed their capacities to “digest” the flows.  From the time when many of our roads were designed and built in the mid ‘80s until 2020, we have had minimal problems.  Since 2020 we have experienced multiple run off events where the once adequate systems for managing flows have become overwhelmed.  Whether just a heavy and prolonged rain, or the combination of heavy rains rapidly melting accumulated snow, our culverts are no longer big enough, and/or formerly adequate water bars aren’t strong enough to handle the flow.  While the result is significant damage to the roads and sediment blown downstream, we’re aware that the damage could have been much greater and more costly.    In contrast to my late father’s common statement of “that’s just the way we do things around here”, the forest again teaches us that we need to change our approaches to adapt to changing conditions.  We’ve now shifted our approaches to designing, building and maintaining roads and related drainage to both adjust to new realities but also to anticipate future increases in peak flows.   As the forests change, those changes change us.

Low Flows – During that part of the year when we’re not tracking high flows, we increasingly experience the opposite extremes.  We’re fortunate that our forests are rich in springs – ground water coming to the surface and flowing through the forests’ many creeks.  While some flow only seasonally, many have flowed with cold, clean water throughout our forty year tenure.  We take special care to treasure and protect the water so that it leaves the forest ready to add value to the Tualatin River which it reaches less than a mile from the forest’s edge.  Each year we monitor the water along its journey from spring to river, with a main focus on water temperature during the hot, dry summers.   In recent years, our dismay at finding the creek reaching dangerously high, salmon killing temperatures as it flowed across farmland to the river has been replaced by the greater concern of discovering that the entire creek has run dry.    Spring-fed creeks within the forests that have flowed year around throughout our memory, have run dry annually since 2022.  My meteorologist wife suggests that these changes are driven more by increasingly hot summers than by changes in precipitation.  We adapt to these changing conditions while also wondering about the ways that other parts of the forest ecosystems are being stressed and challenged to adapt as well.  What became of the creatures that lived in and depended on that once flowing and now dry creek?

Wildfire – I have trouble thinking of a region, near of distant, whose identity has not been shaped by some significant past event.  Here in Oregon’s north Coast Range, a powerful event was the series of large wildfires collectively known as the Tillamook Burns.  First hand memories are passed down, generation to generation, through our families – red skies at midnight, ash falling on Portland and kids being schooled by the experience of planting vulnerable seedlings into fire scorched landscapes.  Many in my generation grew up with both an awareness that large fires have long and powerfully shaped western Oregon and an assumption that changed practices and improved firefighting capacities had made these fires a thing of the past.  The wildfires that swept across over one million acres of western Oregon forests starting on Labor Day 2020 quickly and decisively showed how false that complacent assumption was.   While the major fires, fortunately for us, burned far away on the western slopes of the Cascades, for the first time in forty years three wildfires have burned within two miles of our Mt. Richmond Forest.  In Sept. of 2022, the Powerline Fire burned 126 acres  directly north and in August of 2024 the Lee Falls Fire burned 280 acres close to the northwest.  Closer to home, a child on neighboring land started a fire within a half mile of the forest’s edge.  Though, in all cases, we were so fortunate that skilled firefighters successfully contained the fires, we know too well how easily each fire could have led to very different outcomes.  Adding to the growing list of questions that we wonder about, we ask “is it just a coincidence that we’ve experienced three, nearby wildfire misses in the past five years, or is this a change driven by something beyond coincidence?”.  This is an honest question, and we don’t know the answer.  We’ve always taken our responsibility to minimize fire risks and to be well prepared seriously, but lessons from the past five years motivate us to pay even closer attention.

As much as I wish that life in the forest had been less eventful, challenging and troubling over the past five years, it is what it is and the experiences have taught us new lessons about ways that we and the forests can and must learn to be more adaptable, resourceful, thoughtful and aware than we’ve been in the past.  In contrast to the bad news of the changes summarized above, we find the good news that we have the willingness and ability to summon the necessary traits.  When some around us speak of “adjusting to the new normal”, I have trouble accepting that, going forward, “normal” will be the useful term that we once thought it to be?

Do the changes we’re experiencing in the forests bring me sadness?  Of course – who can live with and through the losses, challenges and rising uncertainties and risks without feeling sadness?  My choice to know and love these forests inevitably exposes me to grief.   Am I surprised by what’s happening?  No, though uncertainties will always remain, the changes in the forest align well with what we have been told to expect.  Our species’ choice not to change course as much is required puts us together on an unfortunate road toward a place we can’t afford to go.