Agencies burn 1,300 acres in Trail of Tears State Park

For decades, forest management policy across the United States dictated that any fire, anywhere in the woodlands, should be snuffed out.

Those practices have been abandoned in favor of modern ideas that view fire as a natural, and generally beneficial, part of a forest system. On Wednesday at Trail of Tears State Park, that thinking was applied to the Indian Creek Wild Area as crews from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, the Missouri Department of Conservation and the U.S. Forest Service burned off leaf and wood debris on 1,300 acres, about a third of the park's more than 3,400 acres.

Most of the area had never been through a controlled burn, said Hershel Price, park superintendent. Storm debris and accumulated leaf litter up to 6 inches thick choke the forest floor and could have become the fuel for a devastating fire under the right conditions.

"It is in real bad need to do the fire," Price said. "Prescribed burning is a good thing."

Trail of Tears State Park's woodlands have a large population of cucumber magnolia, beech and tulip poplar, Price said. A controlled burn now, he said, will reduce the competition from oak and hickory trees that would eventually supplant the current stand if no fire occurred.

"This is what Mother Nature had done back before man," Price said. "Burning is one of the finest landscape management tools in our arsenal."

In the planning stages for months, the decision to set Wednesday's fire wasn't made until 2:30 p.m. Tuesday when weather forecasts showed the humidity would be right, the wind would not blow too hard and there was good weather for a helicopter to fly over the wild area. Crews clad in yellow shirts and green pants of fire-retardant Nomex began the day by setting backfires with drip torches along the PeeWah Trail.

Complex burn

DNR regional resource management director Tom Turpin said the fire was the largest and most complex prescribed burn in state park history.

"It is hard to do a fire line in here," Turpin said of the steep hillsides and sharp ridges that, along with the jumble of limbs, sticks and underbrush, make the wild area almost impenetrable except on trails. "I have worked all over Missouri, and this is the roughest terrain in Missouri."

Controlled burning does many beneficial things for the forest, said A.J. Hendershott, regional supervisor for the Missouri Department of Conservation. It allows small, sensitive plants like pennywort and monarda, or wild bee balm, to grow. Both respond well after a fire moves through. The ash adds a burst of nutrients to the soil that is quickly returned to the plants instead of over several years through slow decomposition.

"There is more diversity on the burn side," Hendershott said as he pointed to an area on the southeast side of the PeeWah Trail where crews burned a hillside to help contain Wednesday's big fire. "On the unburned side, there is less diversity, more clutter and the forest is not as healthy."

American Indians learned that fire made their lives easier, Hendershott said. After a fire, flowering seed plants would flourish, producing more food both for humans and animals. And as animals were attracted by the extra food, they in turn nourished the natives, Hendershott said.

Prescribed burns need to be tightly controlled, carefully watched and set only when the weather clearly is not going to cause the fire to overwhelm crews and race out of control.

A wrong or hasty decision about a prescribed burn, such as trying to force it into a tight weather window, can have serious consequences. A fire in New Mexico jumped the containment line in May 2000 and ravaged Los Alamos, destroying 235 homes in one night and doing extensive damage to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

On Wednesday, the three cooperating agencies had more than three dozen workers on site helping set the fire and make sure it remained contained. After they set up the fire line, a helicopter dropped pingpong-ball-sized incendiary bombs filled with magnesium and glycol to start the main fire deep in the woods.

By late afternoon, the fire had burned through the 1,300 acres and a small crew was watching hot spots. The park, closed during the burn, will reopen today except for the scenic overlook of the Mississippi River, which will remain closed until Friday.

While visitors will notice the ash and charred limbs for a while, soon they will see the new growth that is released by the removal of debris, Hendershott said. "This fire is intended to restore things and bring it back into proper balance."

rkeller@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

Trail of Tears State Park, Jackson, MO

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