Columbia Breaks Fire Interpretive Center

About 15 miles south of Lake Chelan in central Washington, the small town of Entiat is home to one of the 107 Hotshot bases found throughout the western United States. Hotshots have one of the most exciting and dangerous jobs in the world as they are the first responders when a fire breaks out anywhere in the dry western forests. Often they are dropped from the sky from airplanes or helicopters to meet and defeat these fires. To tell their story and the story of wildfires in the West, a foundation began with the desire to save an old lookout by bringing it down from the mountain to this site along busy Highway 97 was created in 1990.

Badger Mountain Lookout from near Wenatchee.

East Flattop Lookout from near Mt. St. Helens in SW Washington.
Significant because of the unusual tilted windows.

Today the Columbia Breaks Fire Interpretive Center consists of three lookouts, an interpretive trail, a trail memorializing fallen firefighters, and an informational center with plans for another display panel and and interpretive garden of “fire-safe” plants to help homeowners.

The memorial trail consists of about 30 plaques naming the fallen firefighters and the fire and the year the fighter was killed. Beginning with two fires in 1929 the plaques name 17 fires. I don’t know how many firefighters have died over the years, but the deaths include 13 deaths on the Storm King fire in Colorado in 1994 and 19 of the 20 hotshots fighting a fire in Arizona in 2013. Even the best preparation does not always mean safety for all. An excellent book about the dangers is Young Men of and Fire by Norman Maclean describing the aftermath of a 1949 fire in Montana that killed 12.

A view of the landscape along the Columbia River

Ponderosa Pine

The ½ mile interpretive trail explains the role of fire in dry pine forests east of the Cascades. These forests, consisting primarily of Ponderosa pine, have been devastated by extreme fires in the last several years. These more recent fires are different than those in the past which would burn at a much lower temperature and consume fewer acres. The reasons for this are several including the drought conditions and higher temperatures we have faced in recent years. But at least as significant are the fire suppression efforts that have been in place since the early 1900s.

The forest as it was prior to fire suppression.

The forest after fire suppression.

The trees with an 'X' are to be removed opening up this forest.

These suppression efforts have completely changed the appearance of the forests and made them much more susceptible to the huge wildfires we see today. I thought I knew most of this story, but as I walked along the interpretive trail I learned much more. At different stops along the trail, the volunteers have recreated the forest to look as it did around 1900 before fire suppression began, what it looks like when fire suppression has succeeded, and how foresters are working to return the forests to their more natural state. 16 interpretive signs tell the story.

This sign shows how the forest has filled in over the years.

My biggest surprise was the sign showing a picture of a wagon driving through the forest around 1900. It was easy to drive wagons through the forests back in those days. Then forest managers decided to protect the forests and the people from all fires and began to put out all fires as quickly as possible. For the forests, this eliminated the opportunity for those smaller fires to clean out the underbrush and smaller trees allowing the more widely-spaced trees to grow taller and stronger. Over the years the empty spaces filled in with smaller pines and other trees and shrubs depleting the resources needed by the older trees. In their weakened state, those older trees were more susceptible to disease and lacked some of the moisture that would have helped them survive the fires and repair the minor damage they caused.

The tree in this sign was burned several times between 1817 and 1889.
After fire suppression we see no more evidence of fires.

Another result of the increased undergrowth is that the fires were more able to reach the crowns of the mature trees making it easier for the fires to spread. Under ideal circumstances, the lower branches of the trees fall off as the tree matures so there is no ladder for the fire to climb.

Chelan Butte Lookout overlooked Lake Chelan.

This box below the lookout kept food safe from predators.

One more aspect of this effort was a system of fire lookouts strategically placed all over the west. Staffed by men mostly and a few women for the summer, these mostly young lookouts spent a lonely summer watching for fires. Their only contact with the outside world was their regular reports to the base and the nightly hoot-owl hour when they had full access to the radio to talk to their colleagues in other lookouts. I remember listening to some of these conversations when I was growing up in Concrete, Washington. Because my father was the district ranger he had a radio in the house so I could listen. I don’t remember any of the conversations, but I wonder at times if I was listening to Jack Kerouac or Gary Snyder or any of the other beat poets who spent a few summers as lookouts in the early 1950s.

Overall I spent an interesting couple of hours at this spot and highly recommend stopping by if you are in the area.

The remaining pictures are of some of the flowers blooming this spring. The first one however shows the most dominant shrubs in the ecosystem. On the left is bitterbrush which is the more dominant after a fire because they can regenerate from the root crowns and underground seed caches made by rodents. Sagebrush must be regenerated by seeds from outside the fire zone. Both have a long taproot (up to 18 feet) and lateral roots to find water. Both are important sources of food and shelter for animals. Perhaps the most important today is that the sagebrush is necessary for the endangered sage grouse. It eats the leaves and depends on the plants for nesting sites.