I previously-blogged about the peculiar problems of the forests of northern Arizona that make them unusually vulnerable to fire. I learned about these problems when I spent the winter of 1985/86 at the U.S. Forest Service's Fort Valley Experimental Station, located a few miles NW of Flagstaff, AZ, and talked to the scientists there, principally Dr. Richard Tinus, who specialized in these matters. In short:
The ponderosa pine forests of the Mogollon Rim and northern Arizona suffer from a strange constitutional defect. Bare soil (resulting from extensive 19th-Century cattle grazing), combined with perfect moisture and temperature conditions in the spring of 1919, meant that every seed dispersed from every dropping pine cone that bountiful year managed to sprout and grow into a tree. But each tree faced fierce competition from all the neighboring seedlings. The results are clusters of tiny, 90-year-old spindly trees growing everywhere in the forests that serve as perfect kindling for fires. The area cries out for these clusters to be thinned, but it's back-breaking work that will never, ever be done. Thus, the entire region is primed for severe fires.
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