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Preserving
the Past with Fire
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The
MIST system is used during a
prescribed burn at Golden
Spike.
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While driving into the park, many of
the visitors to Golden Spike have noticed
the fire-blackened fields and ditches
along the roadside. These fires were not
started by sparks and cinders from our
resident steam locomotives but are
actually part of a new strategy designed
to reduce vegetative fuels and preserve
archaeological sites. These areas are part
of the park's resource management program
that incorporates the use of prescribed
fires to benefit the park's cultural and
natural areas. Prescribed fires are fires
that are intentionally ignited under
approved conditions to achieve a result
that is favorable to the park.
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Today we understand that fire may assist in
maintaining the natural balance of the environment.
This is not a new discovery and by looking to our
nation's past we learn that for hundreds of years
prior to the European influence Native Americans
used slash and burn operations to clear land, as a
hunting technique, and for agricultural benefits.
Fire was also set by early American settlers to
improve range lands for livestock. For centuries,
farmers have used fire to add nutrients to the soil
or to remove unwanted vegetation. However, in the
last century, fire has as a destructive enemy that
consumes huge sections of land and obliterates
property. For more than fifty years government
agencies have extinguished all wild fires as
rapidly as possible. The public's awareness of the
danger of fires has been ingrained into everyone's
mind for many years. An example of this, is the
didactic message of the U.S. Forest Service mascot,
Smokey Bear-- "Only you can prevent forest fires!"
Although this message is still relevant in many
situations, the impression it leaves can be
misleading or contradictory to what we now
understand; that fire can play an essential role in
the natural succession of our ecosystem.
In the past, the practice of suppressing all
fires has allowed vegetative fuels to increase, a
practice that has created conditions that are often
uncontrollable during a wildfire. By removing
organic fuels periodically with prescribed burn
techniques, the chances of a wild fire being
controlled are greatly increased. Past wild fires
experienced within the park have resulted in burned
out historic wood culverts and trestles and the
threatening of other valuable resources such as the
engine house. In areas that have had fires
suppressed, extensive woody shrubs such as
sagebrush and rabbitbrush have had enormous
opportunities to expand their root systems. These
roots are eroding the historic grades and culverts
and resulting in the collapse of archaeological
stone walls and other features here at Golden
Spike.
With this new paradigm of using fire as a
beneficial tool, Golden Spike developed a new Fire
Management Plan that incorporates resource goals
and techniques tailored specifically to protect the
park's unique archaeological attributes. The
concept of using fire to protect historic and
archaeological features such as rock-walled
campsites from encroaching vegetation and soil
accumulation is a new idea for most government
officials. To strengthen arguments for the use of
fire as a noninvasive tool, archaeologist from the
National Parks Service and the Utah State Historic
Preservation Office both had to agree that fire
would do less harm to the archaeological features
than the traditional methods of using hand tools or
pesticides. After the pros and cons of using fire
were weighed, it was determined that fire would be
an effective means of accomplishing resource
management goals.
The Park's resource goals for using fire state
that prescribed fire will be used to maintain the
Promontory's landscape and vegetation similar to
what existed in the late nineteenth century,
protect park resources, and reduce the impact of
mature vegetation on archaeological sites and
features.
Structures as old as the 131 year old railroad
camps and archaeological features can easily be
affected by the impact of large, modern machinery
such as fire trucks and water tankers. Sensitive
ways of managing and preserving the archaeological
features such as wooden culverts and stone walls
were considered. One of the Park's strategies
includes the use of a tactic known as MIST. MIST is
an acronym for Minimum Impact Suppression Tactics.
MIST tactics often use water delivery by small
non-intrusive hose streams rather than using a
bulldozer to scrape a fire line into the earth's
surface. This mean that the use of many small fire
hoses laid from safe zones is acceptable, but using
large water tankers and helicopter drops where
firefighters "put the wet stuff on the red stuff"
is too damaging and therefor out of the
question.
Coordinating these techniques with neighboring
officials has required considerable planning and
some cooperative agreements. Local county fire
services and park neighbors are playing a key role
in the successful implementation of this plan. Most
wildfires in the park are fought by with the aid of
nearby agencies working with Park Service
personnel. The use of MIST techniques has worked
well in preserving archaeological features within
the park's boundaries and will be continued in the
future.
Using prescribed fire techniques in 1999,three
areas totaling 130 acres of land were burned
throughout Golden Spike's property. There was also
a wildfire caused by a lightning strike that burned
both private and federal property. Because of the
new fire management plan, county and NPS fire crews
were able to use this natural fire to accomplish
some of the park's archaeological and fuel
reduction goals. This wild fire resulted in the
burning of 350 additional acres.
Initial studies indicate that the burns have
benefited the park's archaeological areas.
Beginning in 2000 an archaeological team will
conduct large-scale survey to verify this initial
assessment. If this study indicates that the
prescribed burns have worked as well as they appear
to have, Golden Spike will move forward with its
plans to burn three more areas in the next
year.
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At first glance, prescribed burns may
seem like an enormous amount of work to
protect some rock piles and sage covered
land in a Great Basin desert. But these
rocks tell the story of thousands of men
who worked to complete a railroad that
would change the way people thought and
traveled, a railroad that allowed millions
of emigrants the opportunity to pursue
their dreams in America. Today, this is
what we are preserving with fire, the
story of the transcontinental
railroad.
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Ranger John Moeykens
uses a drip-torch to ignite a prescribed
fire.
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