Fuels Management Completed in Grand Canyon North Rim Developed Area

Heavy fuels burning in the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

NPS

In 2021, with the assistance of rangers from Grand Canyon, North Rim Fire Department, NPS firefighters, U.S. Forest Service firefighters, Arizona Conservation Corps crew, and outside of area fire resources, Grand Canyon National Park prepared and conducted mechanical hand cutting and broadcast burning operations around the North Rim developed area. For decades, ongoing fuel reduction and prescribed fire application has been completed around this footprint, annually targeting 30-50 acres for mechanical thinning and prescribed fire application.

For calendar year 2021, prescribed fire operations were completed in three non-adjoining units. For about the past five years the program had not applied fire in the developed area and many legacy piles were scattered, needing to be burned. In late 2020, crews completed pile burning, which set the stage for spring 2021 entries for broadcast burning in the 21-acre Curve unit, 12-acre Sewage unit, and 7-acre Transept unit. All these thinning and burning actions create defensible space adjacent to infrastructure on the North Rim developed area of the Bright Angel Peninsula. Other benefits of these types of treatments around the developed area include lessening chances of human-caused ignitions in congested wildland-urban interface areas, providing areas of shelter in place for employees and visitors if an uncharacteristic wildfire event were to ignite nearby, and lessening smoke and fire impacts to travel corridors for exit routes.

Working with partners will be critical for the continued implementation on this project and other fuels reduction work on the Grand Canyon. These units, and others in the North Rim developed area, are on a 5-10 year cycle for prescribed fire reentry.