The Lone Pine Fire started on a hot afternoon in August 1992, about ten miles east of Chiloquin, in the Winema National Forest in south-central Oregon. The cause has never been confirmed. Within hours the blaze spread over more than 3000 acres of a forest once described in a 1950s federal study as "the finest stand of ponderosa pine in the world."

After seven years of deepening drought, conditions in the woods were extreme. To make matters worse, the fire occurred in mule deer winter range, an area that for years had been managed to provide maximum cover and forage for a deer herd two to three times the historical carrying capacity. As a consequence, little or no prescribed burning had been done in the area, even though the forest ecology of the Winema historically was shaped by a natural fire regime of frequent low intensity burns. Instead, all wildfires had been actively suppressed for at least 75 years, and fuel loads were unprecedented, with high bitterbrush and dense understory throughout much of the area. I know because I walked the future burn zone in 1990, while working on the Winema old growth inventory. The area boasted some of the finest old growth stands on the forest, including one ancient conifer stand on Calimus Butte with giant 50 inch DBH (diameter breast height) sugar pines and white firs. I well recall the abundance of songbirds.

For five long hot days the fire raged out of control, settling down to rest each evening, flaring up again in the heat of the following day. Driven southeast by winds from the northwest, the fire's leading edge made repeated runs, while spotting new secondary blazes as much as a quarter mile ahead of the main columns. These secondary fires made it impossible for fire crews to establish, let alone hold, a line in its path. Eventually crews were forced to back off and establish, instead, a perimeter parallel to the path of the fire along its flanks. From such points of relative safety, fire-fighters could do little more than watch as the firestorm roared southeast until, on the fifth day, after consuming nearly 31,000 acres (including 4,700 acres of old growth), the beast finally ran out of fuel, sputtered, and was corralled.

Lone Pine was the largest wildfire in Oregon during the long hot summer of 1992. It was also a natural spectacle, awe-inspiring. I talked with seasoned fire-fighters who told me, still bug-eyed, that they'd never experienced anything like it. Though a wonder, the fire was at least matched by the phenomenal human melodrama that followed in its wake. Even as mop-up crews worked the fire zone, which smoked and smoldered for a week, a familiar and all-too-human hysteria crept into the local community. At issue, a sudden astounding windfall, and for that prize, consuming desire: millions of fire-killed trees over an entire landscape, an estimated 100 million board feet of prime mostly ponderosa pine saw timber just sitting there like ripe fruit on the vine waiting to be plucked. It was a logger's wet dream come true. The Forest Service wasted time announcing preparation of salvage sales and a decision at the earliest possible date. Apparently even this was not soon enough, because within weeks Winema forest administrators came under mounting pressure from local county commissioners and the timber industry, backed bytheir power brokers, Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) and Representative Bob Smith (R-OR), to get those dead trees cut and to the mills before they could lose a dime's value. In the face of this second storm, what could the bureaucrats do but hang tail? The Forest Service was as philosophically ill-equipped to resist political interference as it had been physically incapable of halting that earlier wall of wild flames.

So it came to pass in a moral welter that the concerns of local environmentalists were spoken, duly entered into the NEPA record, and then, the necessary forms having been accommodated, politely ignored. Conservationists wanted sizeable control areas set aside, reserves where standing dead trees would remain unharvested, so that natural recovery could occur and be studied over time--years later to be compared with the rest of the burn slated for salvage and artificial regeneration. Such proposals did not seem visionary to those of us who advanced them, only sensible. Instead, the Forest Service promised to retain snags in ALL tree size classes and to meet or exceed forest plan standards on snag densities throughout the burn. Conservationists objected--to no avail. This salvage operation was a freight train on a fast track, and unstoppable. By early spring, 1993, the lines in the field were flagged, trees marked, and the chainsaws were already screaming. And dusty caravans of loaded log trucks--at the peak, well over two hundred a day--began thundering through the usually quiet little town of Chiloquin en route to the mills, mostly on the Westside, a hundred or more miles yonder.

By mid-summer, 1993, logging of the largest round of salvage sales was mostly completed and, after acquiring permits, local conservationists entered the scene of destruction. We immediately discovered to our surprise and disappointment a conspicuous absence of large snags, despite the former explicit Forest Service commitment "to leave snags of all sizes, including representatives from the largest tree size classes." Plentiful smaller snags had been left throughout the salvage zone, but vanishingly few greater than 30 inches DBH had been left. As it turned out, closer examination of the pertinent Forest Service planning document revealed a curious inconsistency in the arrangement of tree size classes. The fine print showed that although the Forest Service had arranged the categories in ascending two-inch increments up to 22 inches DBH, thereafter the rules inexplicably changed. Over 22 inches, all trees were simply lumped together in one largest size group.

Conditions on the ground closely reflected the fine print. Though much of the burn area had contained a generous scattering of large to VERY large trees before the fire, snags of punkin' size were almost nowhere to be seen. With few exceptions, the largest snags we observed turned out with unremarkable uniformity to be within the 22-24 inch DBH size bracket. In short, by stacking the deck, the Forest Service finessed a shaky resolution of its self-perceived dual-mission to extract the maximum timber volume while still meeting the minimal letter of the law regarding wildlife standards, i.e., retaining snags "of all size classes."

Outraged by this sleight of hand, local environmentalists aired grievances in a pointed August 30 letter to the Lone Pine Fire Recovery ID Team. During a September 7 tour on site, we discussed snags with Chiloquin district ranger Gene Klingler and staff. We were told that the Recovery ID team had discussed the option of leaving greater numbers of VERY large snags during the project's brief planning phase, but had rejected the idea since it was believed that VERY large snags (i.e., 30-50 inches DBH) could be expected to stand only a few years longer than their cousins in the 22-24 inch DBH range. The ID team's judgement was that VERY large snags represented little or no added gain for wildlife, compared with snags that were considerably smaller but still technically within the largest size class. We were told also that little or no scientific literature on the subject of snag longevity existed. And we were told that, in any event, Winema forest plan standards actually had been exceeded.

Local conservationists then initiated an independent investigation of the snag issue. We already knew, of course, that Winema LRMP guidelines on snag size were woefully inadequate. We had brought this deficiency to light previously in an old growth lawsuit (pending appeal) in which we are the local plaintiffs. A brilliant review of the scientific literature by our attorney David Edelson of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) had noted research published in 1986 and 1987 by Forest Service scientist Evelyn Bull demolishing all current eastside snag retention standards. Several studies by Bull in the Blue Mountains demonstrated that the average size of snags utilized for nesting by Pileated Woodpeckers, one of our eastside indicator species, is 32-33 inches DBH. This figure is not even approximated by current Winema standards which, based on outdated 1970s research, require snags of only 21 inches. This was the standard, we were informed, that was so beneficently exceeded by the Lone Pine Fire Recovery Plan.

Nor, we knew, is the Pileated Woodpecker the only native species in eastern Oregon requiring VERY large snags for roosting and/or nesting. At least two others, the Williamson Sapsucker and a transient, the Vaux's Swift, also require VERY large snags.

With all this in mind, we began investigating the closely related issue of snag longevity. What we learned confirmed our fears and was in sharp contrast with what we were told during the September 7 meeting. We learned that research on ponderosa pine snag longevity had been conducted by a forester, F.P. Keen, on a neighboring forest to the south, the Modoc National Forest, and published as early as 1927. Keen later did a second follow-up study in subsequent years right in our own backyard, on what is now the Winema, which was published in 1955. So much for "little or no scientific literature."

In this second article, Keen took pains to note that VERY large snags often last much longer than smaller snags, and he suggested that the reason was because VERY large snags have much more heartwood than smaller snags. Heartwood, being more dense than the softer sapwood that predominates in smaller trees, resists decay significantly longer. Therefore, VERY large trees make snags that, on average, last considerably longer--not just a few extra years--and for this reason are of disproportionally greater value to wildlife. All this made perfect sense to local environmentalists, and prompted wonderment at how the Forest Service could remain so blissfully unaware of research conducted by its own scientists.

We also discovered that the added longevity of VERY large snags in a burn zone such as Lone Pine may even be enhanced due to an effect observed by another Forest Service researcher, W.G Dahms, in 1949. Dahms noted that fire-killed pine snags in eastern Oregon remained standing roughly twice as long as trees killed by beetles. Accordingly, if a 22 DBH inch beetle-killed pine produces a snag that stands for 20 years, a fire-killed tree of the same size would last roughly 40 years. And, if a 38 inch DBH beetle-killed pine produces a snag that lasts for 40 years, a fire-killed pine of the same size would stand for a whopping 80 years.

The difference between these two cases, a full doubling of snag longevity caused by fire hardening, indicates that the Chiloquin district staff reached a hasty judgement when they concluded that retaining VERY large snags represented only a marginal gain for wildlife. In fact, assuming Dahms' research is valid, precisely the opposite is the case. In a severe burn area like Lone Pine, where regeneration is expected to take many decades, and where opportunities for future snag replacement are very limited, it would be hard to overestimate the importance of leaving the

biggest snags.

None of this snag information is so surprising. These concepts are matters of common sense. Yet, the simplest truth apparently remains too elusive for the Forest Service. Though the agency should be managing burn zones, especially large hot burns, to provide habitat for cavity nesters so these birds can persist, clearly, in the economic interest of generating maximum cut volume, they are not. In the case of Lone Pine, it is a short gain fumble that is liable to have serious long-range consequences. Since, due to its intensity, the Lone Pine fire left relatively little in the way of a forest mosaic, a serious deficiency of snags will develop throughout the area, as the last existing snags fall. A "hole" devoid of habitat will then occur over thousands of acres. As keystone cavity nesting species drop out of the ecosystem, biodiversity will rapidly fall off, as a cascade of biological effects ripples through the system, effects we cannot predict, but which are certain to be deleterious to forest health. The loss of biodiversity will then likely persist for many years, until nature can produce trees large enough for suitable new habitat.

Nor is Lone Pine likely to be a lone scenario. Rather, it portends a growing problem on eastside forests throughout the region. Loss of biodiversity following over-eager salvage of large intense burns is likely to be repeated again and again, economic realities being what they are, because large hot fires like Lone Pine are the trend east of the cascades. This is due to the unprecedented and increasing fuel loads on eastside forests, caused by nearly a century of wildfire suppression and intensive logging. And this threat to biodiversity is likely to remain a problem for many years into the future, long after eastside restoration has begun. Given so much abuse for so long, restoration, featuring various site specific combinations of understory thinning, salvage and prescribed burning, will probably take at least ten to fifteen years to produce noticeable improvement on the ground. Which is assuming that restoration happens at all, which is far from certain, since many obstacles remain, not the least of which is a lack of consensus among environmentalists on how best to proceed.

So, clearly, the lessons of Lone Pine are not limited to snags, nor even to biology. The deeper issues are all-too-human. And among these issues, perhaps the biggest question in need of an answer is why the Forest Service, which claims to base policy on the best available science, remains so doggedly reluctant to listen to its own scientific experts. In my opinion, only two possible explanations can account for this. Either, as others have argued, the Forest Service simply is committed to resource extraction at any cost, and hence is corrupt beyond easy redemption, OR the agency is just plain incompetent, burdened with too many employees whose chief loyalties are to retirement pensions rather than to the forest placed in their safe-keeping.

Corruption or incompetence. Take your pick. As Soren Kierkegaard phrased it: Either/Or.

Or maybe: shades of both.

For more than three years Mark Gaffney helped National Audubon Society inventory and map old growth forests in eastern Oregon.