Refuge Notebook
Peninsula Clarion Article
Dated
15 June 2001
Refuge plans prescribed fire projects at Mystery Creek and
Funny River
by Doug Newbould
Every spring, the fire management staff
at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge prepares to implement certain prescribed
fire projects. This year, our plans include continuing work at Mystery Creek and
along Funny River Road, plus two new projects.
The Mystery Creek project
area is located about five miles north of the Sterling Highway and ten miles east-southeast
of Swan Lake, between the Mystery Creek Road and the Enstar natural gas pipeline
right-of-way. There are five contiguous burn units in the 5000-acre project area,
much of which was burned by wildfire in 1947. The existing forest fuel type is
best described as a black spruce – lichen woodland, with scattered stands
of white spruce, bluejoint grass meadows and muskeg wetlands.
Two years
ago, we successfully burned one unit and part of a second for about 500 acres
or 10 percent of the project area. Last year, the extreme fire season in the Lower
48 precluded the completion of planned fire projects at Mystery Creek and elsewhere
on the Refuge, as we joined the national effort to fight those fires. Hopefully,
this year will be different.
Our fire management objectives at Mystery
Creek are hazard fuel reduction, habitat enhancement, research, and training.
The prescription is to burn the units when fuel moistures are relatively low,
so as to remove black spruce and expose mineral soil for the propagation of hardwood
(deciduous) shrubs and trees. This will produce the double benefit of reducing
hazardous fuels and improving browse production for moose and hares. Like most
prescribed fires, this burn will provide us opportunities to train firefighters
in the use of fire tools and equipment, and to observe fire behavior in different
Alaskan fuel types.
Ongoing research at Mystery Creek includes wildlife
studies, fire effects monitoring, and a special study conducted by the Pacific
Northwest Research Station (US Forest Service) relating duff consumption and particulate
emissions.
For the past three years, travelers on the Funny River Road
have noticed changes to the forest along the south side of the road where we have
been thinning the trees. The goal here is to reduce the wildfire hazard in the
"wildland-urban interface," by an defendable fire break and escape route
for residents from Funny River to Soldotna. We are doing this by removing hazardous
fuel concentrations of black spruce and beetle-killed white spruce.
We have
allowed the plastic-covered slash piles along Funny River Road to cure over the
winter and planning to burn them this fall. We will complete the cutting phase
of the project this summer, and all pile burning should be completed by the fall
of 2002, resulting in a 6.5-mile fuel break.
New fire management projects
for this year include an interagency cooperative research prescribed burn on state
lands 5 miles southeast of Ninilchik, and a cooperative wildland-urban interface
project with Funny River Emergency Services. Of course, the completion of any
or all of the projects I have mentioned depends upon the kind of fire season we
have here on the Kenai Peninsula, in Alaska and nationally, and upon the weather.
Fortunately, I don’t have to predict the severity of the fire season or the
weather, I just have to prepare for the challenges both might present.
------------------------------
Doug
Newbould is the Fire Management Officer at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.
For more information about the Refuge – visit our headquarters on Ski Hill
Road south of Soldotna, call 907-262-7021, or visit our website at http://kenai.fws.gov.
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