The ecology after the burn

SEELEY LAKE - Seeley Lake District Ranger Quinn Carver stood looking up at the muddy debris that flooded Dunham Creek Road in a landslide approximately three years prior. Imprinted on the hill face above him are the scars of the 2017 Rice Ridge fire. Despite the rows of skeleton trees, the shrubs, forbs and grasses are green and flourishing. 

"We mobilized some equipment quickly but it took about two days to get it in drivable condition," Carver said. "You probably could cross through all the muck if you had a pair of hip waders." 

The Rice Ridge fire burned around 160,000 acres northeast of Seeley Lake on the Lolo National Forest. Areas that burned with high intensity were left bare and dry, prime conditions for a landslide even two years post-fire Over the last three years, five debris flow events have occurred within the Rice Ridge fire zone, two of which occurred near Lodgepole Trailhead. 

Ironically, this portion of the forest was planned to be a part of the 61,000-acre Center Horse Restoration Project. The Center Horse Project area is about 14 miles north of Ovando and includes the North Fork of the Cottonwood and Spring Creek drainages on the west and the McCabe Creek drainage on the east. Work included culvert replacements and removal, timber harvest and prescribed burning of about 5,000 acres. 

Since the original project was modified in 2020 to let the Forest move forward with forest restoration and maintenance, the Lolo National Forest constructed three new bridges on Dunham Creek Road and upsized the narrow culverts beneath with Aquatic Organism Passage (AOP) culverts. AOP or "fish passage" enables aquatic organisms to move around to access habitats. 

According to Carver, there are several phases to addressing the impact of the Rice Ridge fire. 

The first phase is suppression and suppression repair. This is a series of immediate post-fire actions taken to repair damages and minimize potential soil erosion and impacts from fighting fire. This work occurs usually before the fire is completely contained. The work entailed the repair of the hand and dozer fire lines, roads, trails, staging areas, safety zones and drop points used during fire suppression efforts. 

The second phase is the Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER), a team that descends on the landscape to identify risks to critical values and request funding for protective treatments. Long before the smoke clears, they evaluate risks like human life and safety; endangered or threatened wildlife and cultural and heritage resources. 

The phase the Seeley Lake Ranger District is in right now is the post-fire restoration and recovery. 

Since the fire, they've done 80 miles of road maintenance and drainage improvements, including approximately $1.5 million worth of work. In addition to this, they replaced approximately 50 culverts, placed aggregate on the Lower Cottonwood Road and completed in-place road surface improvement on the Morrell Lookout Road.

Carver said there are both benefits and problems associated with the land post fire. With the soil in the Rice Ridge fire line now fertile, both plants and animals, like elk, are benefitting. In contrast, there are several new issues arising post-fire, like the Douglas fir bark beetle infestation, invasive species and weeds and the dangers of recreating in post-burn areas.

"It's starting to become more dangerous," Carver said. "As you look around, the wind is starting to snap some of these trees and we've had some pretty major winds. They're starting to rot. I would say we're entering the window where we recommend people exercise caution." 

Bark Beetle Infestation

Fire-injured trees resulting from wildfires can provide suitable habitats for bark beetles, wood-boring beetles and other "secondary" beetles. Douglas fir bark-beetle is the most destructive bark beetle of Douglas fir in the northern and central Rocky Mountains. 

Since the fire, Lolo National Forest Forest Silviculture and Invasive Program Manager Kurt Wetzstein said the Doug fir bark-beetles infestation around the Seeley Lake/Ovando area has only gotten worse. 

"If you've got a fire event like this, then that exacerbates endemic populations to become epidemic populations," Wetzstein said. "As I imagine, you're probably seeing it right now. You've seen the landscape. There are little pockets of orange starting to show up all over the place."

Evidence that bark beetles have infested a tree is orange-brown boring dust found in bark crevices on the lower portion of the tree's trunk or the ground, at its base. According to Wetzstein, about two thirds of forests in the western US are highly susceptible to disturbance (fire, insects, etc.) due to the physiological stress from dry conditions, making them more receptive to the effects of native and non-native insects. 

"I don't have a crystal ball with all the answers, but with continued warming temps and below average precipitation, it's likely that we'll see continued mortality across our landscapes, from a host of various insects and pathogens," Wetzstein wrote in an email. 

Despite this, he said they are working to find ways to manage the problem of tree mortality, including an annual tree planting program. 

Because planting can be expensive, the non-profit National Forest Foundation helps National Forests pay for the seedlings from the U.S. Forest Service nursery in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

The seeds are locally collected, so they're adapted to the site, before they're shipped off to Coeur d'Alene to be processed, then shipped back to be planted. 

"It's not just seeds from Home Depot that were grown, who knows where," Wetzstein said. 

Wetzstein said they plant western larch and ponderosa pines at low to mid-elevation and whitebark pine at higher elevations because all three species are insect, fire and disease resistant. 

Total planting so far in the Rice Ridge footprint is 2,011 acres.

Since 2018 their planting work includes: 

• 2018: Planted 170 acres in the Dunham Creek drainage

• 2019: Planted 160 acres in the Trail Creek drainage

• 2020: Planted 643 acres mostly in Seeley Creek and Trail Creek drainages

• 2021: Planted 595 acres scattered throughout the Trail Creek, Morrell Mountain, Cottonwood Lakes and Dunham Creek drainages

• 2022: Planted 443 acres mostly in Shanley and Little Shanley Creeks drainages

Ecological effects on elk

Hunched over near the same bridge on Dunham Creek Road, Carver yanked weeds from the nearby hillside. After the fire, an increase in soil nutrients, bare ground and sunlight provided the prime environment for weeds including thistle and knapweed. 

"Any place you have fire suppression take place, you're likely to have weeds," Carver huffed, placing the weeds in a pile on the side of the road. 

Ironically, this influx of nutrients also provided the opportunity for plants and animals to grow. According to the 2021 to 2022 Blackfoot Area Elk Report, elk populations in the Ovando/Helmville areas have steadily increased from 2019 to 2022.

A final report  published by Fish, Wildlife and Parks on elk's access to nutritional resources in the Blackfoot-Clearwater Wildlife Management Area, also known as the Game Range, suggests this may be due to an increase in forage quality post-fire. 

Lauren Snobl, a forestry graduate student at the University of Montana, spearheaded the elk project alongside FWP biologists and forestry professor Joshua Millspaugh from December 2018 to June 2022. 

The focus of the project was to collar and collect samples from elk and vegetation sites to better understand elk distribution and diet post-fire. The most current data for land managers and biologists was done by researchers Mark Hurley and Ross Batley on the Game Range in the late 1980's and early 1990's. The researchers used VHF radio collars to identify migration routes, summer ranges and winter use. 

Previous FWP wildlife biologist Scott Eggeman proposed the most recent project around three years before the study was conducted.

The original focus of the project was to study how the vegetation treatment on the Center Horse Project affected elk distribution, elk use, forage and nutritional condition. Eggeman said the Rice Ridge fire changed that. 

"The burn covered about 70% of the historical summer range of the Blackfoot-Clearwater," Eggeman said. "So [Snobl] looked at the different burn severities and we collared those elk." 

FWP contracted with Quicksilver Air, Inc. to capture the elk in the Game Range using a net-gun, a technique where a net is shot from a helicopter at an elk. Once captured, the crew conducted a series of tests, then collared the elk before release.

Blood samples were taken and teeth for estimating age, then sent to a lab to screen for diseases and test whether the elk was pregnant. Then fecal samples were collected. Based on plant fragments in the fecal pellets, FWP evaluated the important forage plants comprising their winter diet.

Lastly, they used a portable ultrasound to measure rump fat thickness and estimate the percent ingesta-free body fat. The body fat reflects the nutritional resources elk have in their summer ranges. 

Without pre-fire data for the area, they sampled vegetation across a gradient of fire severity and vegetation types to estimate forage quality and quantity. The six vegetation cover types included conifer-dominated mesic forests (subalpine fir and Engelmann Spruce) and conifer-dominated dry forest types (lodgepole pine, ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and western larch). Each of these had three fire severity categories: unburned, low severity and high severity.

In years two and three postfire, Snobl said they did not find evidence that there was a significant difference in forage quality between low and high severity burned forests. Within fire severity classes, low-severity burns tend to have higher forage quality than high-severity burns. However, the Game Range did not differ significantly. 

The report attributes this to the high proportion of low-and-high severity vegetation sampling sites that contained fireweed – an important forage species that rapidly establish and spreads postfire due to its airborne seeds and rhizomatic nature. 

The sample elk's diet primarily consisted of fireweed, huckleberry and sedge during the summer and yarrow, western larch and fescue during the winter. 

"Overall we recommend managers allow mesic forests to burn, where possible, given these forests had the largest increase in elk forage quality when burned" the report stated.

Staring at the fireweed, huckleberry and other native and non-native plants, Carver said fire is an essential part of the ecosystem. While the fire created a prime environment for weeds and bark beetles, it also created a prime place for other life to thrive.

"The vegetation here is looking healthy and there's full coverage of the soil," Carver said. "The recovery here is coming along really nice."