Colorado -- Description and travel; Natural history -- West (U.S.); Rocky Mountains
About twenty-four hours after the lodge-pole blaze a snow-storm came
to extinguish the surface fire. Two feet of snow--more than three
inches of water--fell. During the storm I was comfortable beneath a
shelving rock, with a fire in front; here I had a meal of wild
raspberries and pine-nuts and reflected concerning the uses of
forests, and wished that every one might better understand and feel
the injustice and the enormous loss caused by forest fires.
During the last fifty years the majority of the Western forest fires
have been set by unextinguished camp-fires, while the majority of the
others were the result of some human carelessness. The number of
preventable forest fires is but little less than the total number.
True, lightning does occasionally set a forest on fire; I have
personal knowledge of a number of such fires, but I have never known
lightning to set fire to a green tree. Remove the tall dead trees from
forests, and the lightning will lose the greater part of its kindling.
In forest protection, the rivers, ridge-tops, rocky gulches,
rock-fields, lake-shores, meadows, and other natural fire-resisting
boundary lines between forests are beginning to be used and can be
more fully utilized for fire-lines, fire-fighting, and fire-defying
places. These natural fire-barriers may be connected by barren cleared
lanes through the forest, so that a fire-break will isolate or run
entirely around any natural division of forest. With such a barrier a
fire could be kept within a given section or shut out of it.
In order to fight fire in a forest it must be made accessible by means
of roads and trails; these should run on or alongside the fire-barrier
so as to facilitate the movements of fire patrols or fire-fighters.
There should be with every forest an organized force of men who are
eternally vigilant to prevent or to fight forest fires. Fires should
be fought while young and small, before they are beyond control.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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