The Skyline Trail trailhead near Jean Lake in the Kenai National Widlife Refuge/Craig Medred photo
JEAN LAKE – Another big fire of the type many have been expecting since spruce-bark beetles devasted Southcentral Alaska forests in the 1990s has swept across the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge south of Alaska’s largest city, but the results do not appear near as grim as those found in the wake of fires north of Anchorage that consumed at least 80 structures.
When the Kenai’s long-burning, Swan Lake fire broke out to the south and jumped the Sterling Highway earlier this week, state and federal fire crews were able to get everyone safely out of the area and protect the community of Cooper Landing to the north.
Sparked by a lightning strike in early June, the Swan Lake fire had looked for a time to be under control but roared to life when winds began whipping across the Peninsula. It has now burned nearly 150,000 acres in the Mystery Creek and Chickaloon River drainages and advanced into the refuge’s Skilak Wildlife Recreation Area.
The scent of woodsmoke in the air left Ted Spraker, the former area wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and now the chair of the Alaska Board of Game, in Soldotna smelling a new boom in moose numbers in future years.
And an on the ground examination of conditions in the wake of the fire indicated that might indeed be what happens. The still-smoldering lands near the Sterling had burned deep into the duff layer of the forest.
This the mark of the kind of fire that sets the stage for heavy regrowth of birch and willows, the best of Alaska moose food, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Kenai history
Fire was for centuries a driving force in shaping the habitat of a Kenai refuge that began life as the Kenai National Moose Range in 1941 by order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Scientists had already in those years begun to suspect that the removal of wolves from the Kenai, and wildfire were responsible for big increases in the moose population.
“The 1910 fire cleaned the downed material. Moose rapidly increased thereafter. During the winter of 1921-22 with feed low, large numbers of moose migrated east across steep ridges resulting in the natural restocking of moose in the Resurrection River area along the Alaska Railroad, which had been depleted of moose for years” due to overhunting.
Moose Range designation brought modern wildlife management to the Peninsula and decades of excellent moose hunting followed even as spruce forests once again began to replace willow thickets and young stands of birch that provided the food necessary to support large numbers of moose.
Forest Service plant ecologist Michele Plotkin, who died tragically in an Alaska avalanche in 2000, would later conclude the boom-bust cycle for moose tied to habitat type went back to far before white contact in Alaska.
Radiocarbon dating of the charcoal pointed to a fire history at least 3,000 years long, leading Plotkin to finger fire “as an important disturbance process over many millennia in this transitional climate” and to warn – more than 20 year ago – that “the historical records of fires and tree ages, together with the present mature forest and beetle-kill fuel loads suggests that the next interval of stand-regenerating fires is near.”
The latest fire, which for a time closed the Sterling Highway linking Kenai and Anchorage, has been much more noticeable.
A natural phenomenon in most inland Alaska ecosystems, fire been controlled for decades along the limited Alaska road system. Regular fire fighting efforts have limited the damage from fire but allowed fuel loads to increase. Meanwhile, the consequences of beetle-kills of large expanses of forest have only added to the fuel-load danger.
Once the trees die, Plotkin observed, a lot of sunlight streams into the forest and “blue joint reed grass has been show to increase from under 5 percent to over 50 percent five years after a spruce beetle attack. Total fuel loadings (then) increased from about 10 tons per acre to 35 to 100 tons per acre. When sustained dry conditions occur in the spring fire season, fire danger can increase very rapidly. Fuel loadings that are heavy with an abundance of flashy surface fuels can spread fire into beetle-killed spruce jackstraw resulting in hot, intense fires.”
Climate change
A naturally sparked fire spreading into beetle-killed spruce to become a hot, intense fire is pretty much what happened on the Kenai this year, although the sustained dry conditions came during an unusually, warm, near-drought summer.
Some have been quick to blame this on global warming, though most climate-change models predict a warmer-wetter, coastal Alaska rather than a hotter-drier one. The models suggest the Juneau climate becomes more like that of Seattle, and the Anchorage-Kenai climate more like Juneau.
Juneau is in the coastal rain forest where fires are rare. Despite that, many news outlets have been quick to link the 2019 Anchorage-area fires and the far-more-common Interior fires to the hottest July on record in the state.
The number of fires had increased to 667 by Thursday and the acres burned had crept over 2.5 million, according to Tim Mowry, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, but that’s far from the record 6.6 million acres that burned 15 years ago, the 5.1 million acres that burned four years ago, the more than 4.2 million acres that burned in 1969 and the nearly 3.2 million acres that burned in 1990.
And though wildfire are generally thought of as a “bad” thing, University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists portrayed fire somewhat differently in “Wildland Fire in Alaska: A History of Organized Fire Suppression and Management in the Last Frontier” in 2006.
“During the past century, we reacted to wildland fire in much the same way we reacted to predators,” wrote authors Susan Todd and Holly Ann Jewkes. “At the beginning of the century, we saw fires—and predators—as something to eliminate. We were remarkably
successful at doing so; we eradicated predators from most of their range in the Lower 48 States and, for a time, we almost eliminated fire.
“But by midcentury, many scientists realized that both fire and predators play important roles in ecosystems and that their elimination had unexpected consequences. Where
predators were eradicated, prey species such as deer became overabundant and died slow deaths from starvation. Similarly, when fire was eliminated from areas where it had once been frequent, fuels in the form of underbrush and dead and downed wood became overabundant, increasing the potential for a catastrophic fire.”
Shifting story
Now, a little over a decade on from that, the narrative is shifting again with climate change the focus of attention. This year, NPR was focused on “How Arctic Fires Are Impacting Earth’s Atmosphere” and zeroed in on Alaska even though only about 5 percent of the hundreds of fires burning in the state are actually in the Arctic.
There is, however, no doubt the Alaska fires are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere or that the trendline shows the annual acreage burned in Alaska slowly but steadily increasing since 1965 despite huge seasonal variations in the number and size of wildfires.
“Recent changes in climate have resulted in increases in the frequency of large fire years and have resulted in a dramatic increase in extreme fire events,” Eric S. Kasischke from the University of Maryland and colleagues concluded in a peer-reviewed paper published at NRC Research Press in 2010. “Four of the 11 largest fire years on record since 1940 have occurred between 2002 and 2009, and the increase in frequency of large fire years has been accompanied by a fourfold increase in late-season burning that occurs because large and increasing numbers of extreme fire events in remote areas are too large to control.
“The evidence now points toward the fire regime being vulnerable to climate warming over the near term with the potential for a continuation of large fire years and events and more late-season burning being high.”
The good news is that they expect the problem to cure itself.
“At some point, however, increases in early-successional vegetation combined with changes to postfire succession in black spruce forests will reduce the vulnerability
of the landscape to fire spread,” they wrote.
All the smoke in the air over the Anchorage Metro Area seems to have moderated what was by local standards an overheated summer. With smoke blocking the sun rays, temperatures have returned to normal for this time of year, and temperatures in Willow fell to near freezing on Monday with the dewpoint low enough that some people reported ice forming in their pets’ dog dishes.
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Oops! Hmm, pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to send your kid to PSU to listen to that fraud? “Go to college to get stoopid”!!!
Dr. Mann and his Hockey Stick hoax loses mightily in court. https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/michael_mann_creator_of_the_infamous_global_warming_hockey_stick_loses_lawsuit_against_climate_skeptic_ordered_to_pay_defendants_costs.html
I came across this while reading about the fire history on the Kenai. If you like ye Olde timey pictures mixed in with facts it’s pretty neat. https://www.fws.gov/uploadedFiles/Bella_E_2015.pdf the article from 1966 that said the moose range, just the moose range, had approximately 7,400 moose is a real eye opener!
Steve Stine,
The TruthDig article you link to tries to minimize The Little Ice Age and The Medieval Warm Period, by saying ‘They Were Not Global’.
Well … that only stands to reason, really. Even the hot July we just had …. not everybody had a hot July. So it wasn’t really global, right? No more (and no less) than the LIA and MWP…
This is just another Hockey Stick game. Natural climate-fluctuation was nailed on the head by Al Gore: it’s a darned inconvenient truth.
So it’s very simple, what actually dooms the Climate Movement. Natural, gentle warmer-cooler swings, on a rough cycle of 3-4 decades.
In the 1970s, a cool spell from about 1940 was making some folks nervous. Old hands, though, glanced at their watch and counseled, ‘Calm down there Pilgrim: 4, 3, 2 … Here comes your Warm Spell’.
And again, a very large number of still-standng record high temps, were set in the 1930s. Not long into the early 20th C, it got warm, and it built up through the ’30s.
This is the natural norm; we can’t explain it, but we can observe it … and roughly predict it.
We’re now due for a cooling spell (been about 38 years). Observation of Nature says it’s just around the corner. The Climate Movement is betting that human combustion (about 6% of natural CO2 production) will now trump nature.
The Movement will also claim that Cooling is Warming. And you know what … it’s scientifically conceivable & possible, that they’re right. However, even if they were right, public rejection will devastate the Cause.
Natural climate change is something the Movement should have been careful to allow-for, all along.
Good fire-research here, multiple keeper links on different angles. The Michele Potkin story, the account of her loss on AKFatal – and that site – give it a human side. The Candice Berner page – only wolf attack listed – is a 404.
I just installed a BibItNow! FireFox addon, supposed to build a proper citation from a page without a ref-download; will try it with some of the links in this post.
“European and US scientists have cleared up a point that has been nagging away at climate science for decades: not only is the planet warming faster than at any time in the last 2,000 years, but this unique climate change really does have neither a historic precedent nor a natural cause.”
“This paper should finally stop climate change deniers claiming that the recent observed coherent global warming is part of a natural climate cycle”
“There have been changes in modern human history, but none of them global and synchronous (happening at the same time).
They were random fluctuations within the climate system, and even changes in solar activity or volcanic surges could not affect all of the planet at any one time.”
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/scientists-definitively-debunk-the-biggest-climate-change-lie/
2,000 yrs out of 4, 000,000,000? Um, ok!!! What a bunch of horse chit. No wonder liberalism is a mental sickness.
Steve, S, those “scientists” very existence depends on that fraud “Global Warming”. $$$$
Just like another Dem fraud, The Southern Poverty Law Center and Morris Dee’s and his offshore bank accounts. Apple gave those frauds $1 million. The leftist media push those frauds just like “Global Warming”.
Al Gore and his money suckers. Sheesh.
If we were to use a 2,000 year window to decide science I’m afraid we would be the most ignorant species on the face of the earth. In fact using the 2,000 year window is actually more unscientific than people who believe the world is only 6,000 years old, by a factor of three nonetheless!
Dinosaurs, what dinosaurs, they don’t exist. The pyramids in Egypt, must have been made less than 2,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths, I guess climate changed just caused elephants to shed their hair? Glaciers, we must have been a lot cooler 2,000 years ago since they have been receding…guess that explains the woolly mammoths. Seriously a 2,000 year window in geologic time is less than a blink of an eye, anybody who calls them self a scientist and who discounts information older than 2,000 years old is not a scientist and should be laughed out of every room they walk into.
Dansgaard-Oeschger events show us that over the last 140,000 years (still a short geologic time frame, but 70 times longer than 2,000 years referenced in the linked above) climatic warming events are sudden and also follow a fairly regular time frame.
Well Steve O…
If you do not feel we can gather useful data in a 2,000 year period and then make scientific conclusions then I advise you to not listen to your “Western Medicine” practitioners since the “practice” is around 2,000 years old?
“Very often when we think of the evolution of medicine, or as we refer to it “Western Medicine”, we think as far back as 2000 years ago with Galen in Rome or perhaps 2500 years ago with Hippocrates in Greece.”
(Nova.edu)
Maybe you are just “anti science” and do not believe in the process of testing a hypothesis to draw conclusions through data and observations?
“Antiscience is a position that rejects scienceand the scientific method.
People holding antiscientific views do not accept science as an objective method that can generate universal knowledge.
They also contend that scientific reductionism in particular is an inherently limited means to reach understanding of a complex world.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiscience
Wow Steve, your reading comprehension has seriously gone downhill. Nowhere did I say anything that resembles anything close to what you wrote in your comment.
Actually Steve O…
You said;
“If we were to use a 2,000 year window to decide science I’m afraid we would be the most ignorant species on the face of the earth.”
I was just pointing out that Western Medicine is also 2,000 years of science…and appears to have made much understanding of the human body to some extent?
I guess you still believe in western medicine just not any science that goes against your Libertarian fueled opinions?
You still did not comment on the 2,000 years of science associated with medicine…
Is that also “ignorant” in your opinion?
You cannot reject one 2,000 year science paradigm and accept a similar principle that uses the scientific method…this is hypocritical in every way.
Steve,
I suggest you read what I wrote in its entirety. You are lapsing back into your old habits of reading things that aren’t there and just making things up. No where did I argue that we should disregard science, no where did I argue we should disregard any 2,000 year period. In fact I have argued just the opposite, that we need to look at the entire timeline, not picking and choosing data that fits our predetermined narrative. Your article that you linked to simply wants to disregard ALL time before the arbitrary 2,000 year old time frame for some reason…oh wait, it’s not for some reason, it is only to disprove those they disagree with. That’s not scientific at all by the way.
As far as your western medicine comments, that have nothing to do with the subject of climate change, do you think that western medicine just appeared one day 2,000 years ago? Do you think that western medicine just appeared at the arbitrary 2,000 year window you are so intent upon using? Look at the artifacts that have been found dating back more than the 2,000 years you are stuck on, western medicine did not just appear it was based upon the work of our ancestors. Looking at western medicine from the point of view you have chosen is just as wrong as the people in your article looking at climate in a 2,000 year period.
Steve,
Here are just a few of the western surgical tools that were invented prior to your arbitrary 2,000 year time frame http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/romansurgical/
Steve O…
You clearly write a sentence and then argue to deny that you wrote it?
You clearly said (and anyone can look above) :
“If we were to use a 2,000 year window to decide science I’m afraid we would be the most ignorant species on the face of the earth.”
I am not talking “surgical tools”…I speak of Western Medicine as we know it (about 2,000 years of science and health).
Most treatment plans involve Pharmaceuticals which have only been available for around 200 years.
Do you tell your doctor “sorry I cannot take these antibiotics since they have only been around a few hundred years?”
It seems you are selecting what aspects of science fit your narrow beliefs and tossing the rest of science out in the trash.
It is ok if you are “anti science”…I just do not see ANY consistency in your opinion on scientific matters.
“Originating as a pharmacy founded in Darmstadt in 1668, it was in 1827 that Heinrich Emanuel Merck began the transition towards an industrial and scientific concern, by manufacturing and selling alkaloids…
But the industry as we understand it today really has its origins in the second half of the 19th century.
Whilst the scientific revolution of the 17th century had spread ideas of rationalism and experimentation, and the industrial revolution had transformed the production of goods in the late 18th century, the marrying of the two concepts for the benefit of human health was a comparatively late development.”
https://pharmaphorum.com/articles/a_history_of_the_pharmaceutical_industry/
Steve,
For some reason you have decided to only read one sentence of what I wrote, you’ve completely misunderstood it and any you reject any clarification I’ve made to help you understand.
Instead, you just keep making stuff up. Where did I deny what I wrote? It’s all right up there^, I’ve never denied what I wrote. Furthermore I standby what I said in regards to my initial statement that if we were to use a 2,000 year window to decide science I’m afraid we would be the most ignorant species on the face of the earth. By limiting all of our scientific knowledge to an arbitrary 2,000 year period is completely asinine. The reason your arbitrary 2,000 year period will never work is because all of our knowledge and science is predicated on what came before it.
Once again, I suggest you read what I wrote in its entirety. While you are trying to make this an argument about modern medicine the point remains that cherry picking data (just like you are trying to cherry pick my words) does nothing but illustrate the point that doing so leads to ignorance.
Steve,
I’ve just read this conversation again, and I think I can see where the disconnect is. Let me apologize for not being clear about what it is we were talking about, that’s my fault 100%. I assumed that on an article dealing with fires and climate change, and then responding to your comment dealing with climate change, that we were talking about climate change. So when I said “If we were to use a 2,000 year window to decide science I’m afraid we would be the most ignorant species on the face of the earth.” I really dropped the ball and I should have been more clear in my comment concerning climate change, that I wasn’t talking about modern medicine (which hadn’t been mentioned), but about climate change. Once again, it’s my bad for making such outlandish assumptions, please forgive me and if you can find it within yourself to review my comments with climate change in mind please do so.
I would be interested in your take on the Dansgaard-Oeschger events that span at least 140,000 years with regular and repeating cycles and sudden onset of climatic warming events.
There is no doubt that these fire will destroy, but they will also regenerate. It is the hubris of man that lead to the fuel loading levels that have caused these fires to burn as they have. We simply interrupted a natural cycle by stopping or limiting cleansing fires and by not allowing for the removal of excess fuel.
The local forest have historically changed, as Craig points out in this article, and those forests changing affect the animal life in the area. On the Kenai there are a number of areas named after animals that once filled the land so much the area was named after them, Caribou Hills once had plentiful caribou, the Kenai Moose Range once had plentiful moose, Clam Gulch once had plentiful clams. The local forest have historically changed, as Craig points out in this article, and those forests changing affect the animal life in the area, although they probably did not affect the clams all that much.
Steve O ,easy to say when I suspect your property aint being crispied,or threat there of.As far as human caused climate change, not sure why anybody wouldn’t want the best and only planet we live on to our best powers.
The natural world history is full of critters shitting in there bed,ultimately leading to there cyclical demise.And somehow the high brow homosapien is immune to this cycle?
Dave Mc, of course we all want a healthy environment. Do we want to be taxed trillions by fradulant Democrat schemes in hopes of furthering their Socialist agendas to bring down America? Listen to that idiot AOC or Bernie. Total morons or are they jist your typical Marxist co trol freaks?
The climate has changed for billions of years. Nothing remains tue same except Democrat insanity. There was more Co2 in the air 3 million uears ago then today. “Global Warming”, like “White Priviledge” is just another Democrat boogy-man scam. One thing you can be sure of, if a Democrat is pushing it, you have to peel back few extra layers of that smelly, rotten onion to see the reality.
Also Dave Mc, there are a lot of Wolly Mammoth bones around.. Also, Dinosaurs used to roam the planet. Killed all by “man-made Global Warming”.
Dave Mc, this should be more of a concern than the passing of the seasons:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/justin-haskins-ocasio-cortez-has-yet-another-bad-idea-that-makes-no-sense-and-would-cause-big-problems
Dave,
Rest assured, if my property were being directly threatened I would be much more vocal about how years of mismanagement by those who claimed to know better than anyone else (sound familiar) got us into this situation.
Who are these people who do not “want the best and only planet we live on to our best powers”?
Stev O,
RE:mismanagement,because we should have anticipated a few repeating decade cycles of spruce bark beetles, perhaps caused in part by lack of colder winters?
How do you plan for that?Seems like a fine line between prescribed burns and defensive fire fighting.Who’s going to pay for an army of firefighters and forest management teams for thinning/burning,and the potential liability’s.
Should your property taxes pay for somebody in upper susitna valley’s decision to live or have a cabin in the “Alaskan experience”?
Or perhaps upper hillside in anchorage or the higher and higher slopes of Eagle River?
In that same vein, should your federal tax dollars have been spent to buyout the folks who built on the flood plane of the Matanuska river?
It seems like “hubris of man” to me to think that we can control the forests of such a gigantic state
Dave,
What we should have anticipated was that by allowing fuels to build up when they do burn they create bigger fires. It’s a pretty simple concept really. Before the environmental movement came to be the big bully it is today, we used to log our forests and make something useful out of the wood. Then we slowly started allowing forests to go back to what some thought of as their “natural state”, except we spent millions and millions of dollars to stop just about any fire that started, which further added to the fuel loading.
In case you didn’t notice, we’ve been paying for decades to have “an army of firefighters and forest management teams for thinning/burning,and the potential liability’s.” We’ve been controlling the forests of this state for many, many years, the problem is we have historically done a horrible job at it. Depending on where you live, just take a breath, or look up, or all around.
Craig- great compilation of facts and viable information! Awesome article! Totally agree , it’s going to help moose and other animals in long term . Some plants require fire to germinate. Also breaking down organic materials this way helps give plants nutrients and spreads carbon / ash more uniformly . Helping life cycle. We need more small fires to reduce fire danger . The other option is a more effective wood harvest system.
It seems strange to me that all the “climate deniers” who do not feel human’s actions on Earth can effect the changing climate, are the same group of conservatives who point to human’s fire suppression as a “cause” of these devastating wildfires?
What about how the feds burned the whole ROW for the railroad in the Su Valley nearly 100 years ago?
How did that effect the monoculture of black spruce that we currently are faced with?
The real causes of the McKinley Fire are closer to record droughts and record high temperatures throughout S.C. and most of Alaska this summer.
This compounded with strong winds from the North and many powerlines with trees all around them.
The fire meteorologist said winds this strong and sustained from the North usually are a thing of the winter?
The fire science experts on the McKinley fire are seeing “unprecedented” dry duff beneath the trees which causes difficulty in extinguishing the fire.
The fire has burned over 8 inches into the tundra..very unprecedented in August in Alaska.
More planning and more resources and more residents will be needed in the future to fight these fires.
Some of the new technologies such as “super tankers” should be considered for future suppression.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.telesurenglish.net/amp/news/Bolivia-Orders-Worlds-Largest-Air-Tanker-to-Combat-Amazon-Fires-20190822-0002.html
Whatcha going to do when el Nino with its wetter, warmer Winters and warmer, wetter Summers leaves?
“Some have been quick to blame this on global warming, though most climate-change models predict a warmer-wetter, coastal Alaska rather than a hotter-drier one. ”
On a side note on the Amazon. Why does all the “Global Warming” bozos insist on using fake photos?
And I thought you were going to say that we need to “rake the floors of the forest” to prevent these fires in the future..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nwL6GWYg34M
Steve, I believe nothing the media puts out there. Like alk the Trump distortions the media selectively put out this week on China.
But, you guys act like forest fires or Co2 are something new. WE HAVE HAD Co2 and FOREST FIRES FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS AND A HELLUVA LOT WORSE THEN TODAY.
Steve,
Your first paragraph/sentence/question doesn’t make much sense and I’m not familiar with the term “climate deniers”, must be a new term since the old one didn’t play well…you guys are always trying to change the language to spin your nonsense. I can only guess that you are talking about those who do not believe in the cult of anthropogenic global warming when you say “climate deniers”, since I’ve never heard of anyone denying that there is a such thing as the climate. If that is the case, it seems like your understanding of this issue is not very deep. While there might be some that do not believe in the cult of anthropogenic global warming that might think humans aren’t having any impact on our climate, I expect that number is very small. By paving roads and clearing land for crops, and planting non-native plants, ranching animals, and as you mentioned allowing excessive fuel loading in forested areas by way of excessive fire suppression; most people that I know who do not bow before the cult of anthropogenic global warming acknowledge that humans are undeniably having an impact on our climate, whether it be on our local microclimate or the world’s climate. Where those who worship at the alter to algore and most of those who do not differ is how much of an impact humans are having an impact, the former believe it is the driving force and the latter simply dare to question how much.
Given that if ones world view is such that anthropogenic global warming is beyond reproach, I suppose I can see how something as simple as acknowledging that when humans cause excess fuel to collect in an area and that excess fuel will eventually burn hotter, longer, and will cause more damage it might not make sense. To a person who forms a worldview based on nothing but faith, commonsense and knowledge don’t mean a thing.
It’s unfortunate that after railing against the propaganda of tyrannical governments just a few short days ago you’ve gone back to serving as a tool of the propaganda machine by linking to their stories.
Good Job Craig,,,,,,Gary Baker, Moose Pass, Alaska…