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Hayman recovery: 600 years

Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published June 2, 2007 at midnight

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Five years after the epic Hayman Fire blackened 138,000 acres of pristine Front Range woodlands, nature is sending some promising signals.

A greenish hue tints the landscape, the once- blackened ground colored by blue gramma grasses and splashes of sage.

Trees are returning, too. Not yet the signature ponderosa pine, but willows and cottonwoods filling in along denuded streambeds. Aspen, also, are resurfacing, their labyrinth root systems sheltered from the fire.

Still, it will be centuries before the forest returns to the condition it was on June 7, 2002 - the day before a distraught Forest Service worker started what scientists believe to be the worst wildfire in the southern Rockies in at least 700 years.

On Sunday, June 9, the fire raced 19 miles in 13 hours, a freakish explosion of energy so hot it sparked advance fires a mile ahead of its frontline and sent waves of heat to 21,000 feet.

Metro-area skies turned apocalyptic-yellow, and ash floated downtown, triggering air quality warnings.

The fire, named after a drainage near the town of Lake George, emitted five times the amount of carbon monoxide and twice the particle pollution produced by all of Colorado industry in a year, according to one report.

Such an inferno was long overdue, researchers said, after humans had spent decades quashing small fires, allowing forests to grow unabated and deadwood to accumulate.

That, plus prolonged drought, created a time bomb that finally went off.

"It was sometime in May, we had gone up and it was all crunchy when you went out walking," recalled Margo Hoogeboom, 66, now rebuilding her Hayman-ruined home near Lake George.

"I told my son's girlfriend, 'Boy, this does not bode well.' "

Long road to renewal

Many signs of life have returned to the burn area covering parts of Park, Jefferson, Douglas and Teller counties, and visitors are trickling in as well.

Even at the remote Lost Valley Ranch, spared despite its setting near some of the most intense burn areas, business is on a comeback. Guests on horseback ride out of its pastoral environment and into the startling landscape.

Here, the road to renewal is staggeringly long.

"We're 600 years away from a full ecological recovery, full growth, across the landscape," said Merrill Kaufmann, a researcher emeritus at the Forest Service's 14-state Rocky Mountain Research Station, headquartered in Fort Collins.

That's because ponderosa pine, the keystone tree species at the 6,000 to 8,000-foot elevation zone covered by the Hayman footprint, take decades to mature enough to produce seeds.

Even then, the heavy seeds travel only a short distance - perhaps a few football fields - from the tree.

Those new trees must grow for as long as 30 years before producing more seed, and nudging the forest across the land.

Patches of surviving trees will help the recovery; they can seed the burn areas from inside out. But it's dead trees that dominate.

And as their roots and trunks rot, they're starting to fall over, creating a hazard for hikers. Others will fall fast, the process quickened by windstorms.

Typically, 85 percent of fire-killed trees are down by eight to 10 years after a fire.

Far costlier to the landscape, however, is the way loss of tree cover and root systems drive erosion.

The Hayman exposed the weak, decomposed granite soils of the region to powerful rainstorms that send the hillsides sliding into reservoirs.

Despite the return of grasses, shrubs and other groundcover over more than half the land, the erosion problem continues. For Denver Water, the shedding soil has created a new budgetary black hole.

Dirt traps designed to stop the soil from pouring through Goose and Turkey creeks into Cheesman Reservoir, at the heart of the burn area, are catching more - not less - sediment, said Kevin Keefe, who supervises reservoir operations for the utility.

"All I can say is sediment coming in is bigger than the previous year, and seems to be getting bigger every day," Keefe said. He said he'll need a boost in his $300,000 annual budget to keep cleaning the traps.

In the fall of 2005, the utility cleaned 28,000 cubic yards from the trap at Turkey Creek alone. Last fall, the amount rose to 60,000, and it took Denver Water more than 1,100 truckloads to haul all the sediment away.

There's no end in sight.

The utility continues to fight sediment pouring into Strontia Springs reservoir, 11 years after the nearby Buffalo Creek fire.

It plans a dredging project next year expected to cost more than $20 million.

So much erosion continues five years after Hayman because of two things: big rains, particularly in 2006, and not enough ground cover to hold the soil.

This year is shaping up to be a wet one as well.

"We've seen a lot of moisture this year, and I'm seeing water flowing where I haven't seen it flowing for years up there," said Chuck Dennis, of the Colorado State Forest Service.

Planting seedlings

While repairing the burn is nature's calling, people are doing their part.

The U.S. Forest Service, with financial help from the National Arbor Day Foundation, has planted more than 300,000 ponderosa pine and Douglas fir seedlings on more than 3,000 fire-scarred acres.

The Colorado State Forest Service and Denver Water have pitched in too, planting more than 100,000 trees around Cheesman Reservoir and elsewhere.

Another major contributor is the Coalition for the Upper South Platte, or CUSP, a nonprofit formed in the late 1990s to protect water quality in the region. CUSP has worked with government agencies to coordinate volunteers, including the Boy Scouts, Up With People and Comcast.

Those efforts include tree plantings, trail repair and improvement of fish habitat, said Jonathan Bruno, CUSP's executive director, and have consumed more than 75,000 volunteer hours by about 100 groups a year.

"We've worked with groups from little kids that can hardly walk, with elderly folks who heard about the Hayman and hopped in their RVs and came out from Oklahoma to help plant willows . . . and with people from Japan and Australia," Bruno said.

Meanwhile, foresters are pushing ahead on a project started a few years before the Hayman, one designed to cut the risk of future big fires in the upper South Platte drainage.

Just outside the burn zone contractors use machines that resemble front-end loaders - except with a spinning, bladed drum instead of a loader - to turn living trees into mulch in seconds as part a plan to thin out the forest.

This work, combined with projects that send crews into tough-to-reach parts of the forests with chainsaws and controlled burns, are designed to make up for the job nature used to do.

Small, periodic ground fires every few decades used to be nature's way of keeping ponderosa pine forests open, free of overgrowth and dominated by mature, old growth trees.

But after humans started suppressing such fires, early in the 20th century, the Front Range's ponderosa pine forests became clogged with trees and deadwood.

That, in turn, means small fires can develop into larger, potentially Hayman-like burns.

So forest managers determined that more human intervention was needed to recreate the thinner forest conditions that existed before human settlement - conditions that limit catastrophic events such as the Hayman Fire.

"I just think (the Hayman) opened our eyes to how severe the forest conditions are. They're extremely out of whack compared to where they should be," Dennis said.

"We were all shocked at the extent not only of the Hayman, but (several other 2002) fires. They burned more intensely and covered more acres that we ever would have imagined."

Upbeat future

Foresters are generally upbeat about the Hayman burn zone's future.

Studies have found native plants doing surprisingly well, with strong growth and more diversity in areas than before the fire.

Noxious weeds, though a concern, haven't taken hold as widely and aggressively as some feared.

Brent Botts, a Forest Service ranger in the South Platte district office, is particularly taken with the aspens' return: "The amount of aspen coming up is surprising."

Residents, too, take note.

"It's rebounding," said Dick Furtak, who lives near West Creek. He revels in the small groups of deer that wander on his land but laments his surroundings.

"A bunch of black sticks sticking up out of the ground," he said.

His pessimism seems reinforced by a gloomy spring storm.

When the skies darken and thunder calls and fat raindrops fall, the Hayman zone of renewal changes character. Bleakness quickly overshadows promise.

Suddenly, the Forest Service roads, those dirt paths carved through erosive soils, are shifting under a car.

Gullies fill with water and hillsides appear ready to melt away.

All around, the rotting black poles that once sported wide branches and green needles seem more like sentinels in a dead world.

The greens that caught the eye when sunlight hit the ground fade into a gloomy watercolor of gray, brown and black.

The 5-year-old fire feels not so far away.

The Hayman Fire by the numbers

138,000: Number of acres burned, in whole or in part.

132: Number of homes that were destroyed.

At least 400,000: Number of trees planted by the U.S. Forest Service, the Colorado State Forest Service and Denver Water since the fire.

$600: Cost per acre to plant trees

1,000: Number of acres targeted for replanting annually by U.S. Forest Service

700: Number of years since such a large and intense fire struck the southern Rockies

$42 million: Amount spent battling the blaze

$300,000: Denver Water's annual budget for removing sediment from traps near Cheesman Reservoir

30,000: Number of acres thinned in and around the Hayman area since 1998 to cut fire danger

75,000: Number of hours of volunteer time on forest recovery projects coordinated by the nonprofit Coalition for the Upper South Platte

600: Number of years before the ponderosa pine forest in Hayman area returns to its pre-fire state

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