Ukiah Fire Chief Doug Hutchison knew what kind of hassle the city was getting into by acquiring some 763 acres of overgrown, fire-starved forest on the city’s western edge—but it seemed worth it. There, Doolin Creek’s two forks merge and run through a steep canyon, eventually heading straight through the city and emptying into the Russian River. Steelhead trout, which swim most of the way up the Russian River’s 110 miles to spawn in its tributaries, and year-round resident native fishes like sculpins and roaches, are kept cool by big trees shading the creek. California nutmeg, fragrant like sandalwood, has been spotted here, and spiky chinquapin. Also, the manzanita and chamise are so thick in places that it’s hard to walk through. If a big hot fire rolled through here, it would be very bad for the wildlife, the forest, and the community. The city has taken on the property to mitigate those fire risks and protect the watershed. Hutchison is eager to get a fuels crew up in here to start thinning it out and reintroduce fire in a sane fashion. In his view, protecting the forest and the community go hand in hand.
“What’s the easiest way to protect the community?” he says. “Get back to a healthier fire regime where the fire isn’t going to be as extreme.”
But first he has to hire and equip his 11-person crew—which the city is now doing, thanks to $7 million from the U.S. Forest Service’s Community Wildfire Defense Grants, a $1 billion program created by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021. Among the 48 California recipients announced in the past two years, Ukiah and its partners got one of the largest amounts, and they plan to use the money for fire risk reduction throughout the county. This grant program is meant to help disadvantaged communities that are threatened by wildfire protect themselves—and, simultaneously, make the forest and watershed more fire-resilient.
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Curvy manzanita, charred in a prescribed fire, can be seen amid thick dark-green chamise. In the ravine are the headwaters of Doolin Creek, which supports steelhead and other native fish. (Neil Davis/City of Ukiah); Mixed hardwood areas in Ukiah’s western hills area have grown thick, and are in dire need of thinning to protect both the forest and the community from catastrophic fire. (Courtesy of City of Ukiah)
The landscape resilience goal is essential, says Adrienne Freeman, a Forest Service spokesperson for the program, noting that the federal agency has been tasked with achieving half of the state’s goal to treat 1 million acres with prescribed fire each year across California. Augmenting the Forest Service’s own efforts with this grant program and other local partnerships “is absolutely critical to our success across the state in order to meet these extremely ambitious goals,” Freeman says.
But forest experts say the extent to which Ukiah’s grant helps the forest along with the community will depend on how the money is used.
“They’re not treating as much as I’d like to see,” says Mike Jones, a University of California Cooperative Extension forester. He is on the board of the Mendocino Fire Safe Council, which is advising Ukiah on how to prioritize projects, and is involved with the Mendocino County Prescribed Burn Association. So he’s familiar with the challenges to prescribed burns—not least, people’s fears that they’ll go wrong.
The grant can be a plus for the forest nonetheless, he says. “Because it’s in the public space and it’s highly visible, then it creates an opportunity to show people what stewardship looks like—what prescribed fire looks like. And then we can start to shift the narrative around these projects that people have concerns about.”
Ukiah’s not alone—and its proposed 200 acres of burns is more than many. Bay Nature reviewed 43 of the 48 successful California grant applications (a few weren’t available online), and found that nearly half made no mention of prescribed fire.
Eight applicants proposed doing work that would prepare for such burns, like training, planning, or fuels reduction. Seven communities proposed actually conducting burns—most between 100 and 200 acres over the course of the grant (plus 28 burn days, the metric used by Kern County). And just two communities submitted applications focused wholly on beneficial burns. These are Kern County and Lake County, which is taking an Indigenous-led “traditional ecological knowledge-based approach” and has proposed burning 1,100 acres—more than all the other communities combined.
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A flammable place
In Mendocino, the need to prepare for fire is urgent, for the community and the forest’s sake. Cal Fire’s 2022 Mendocino Unit Plan describes the forested, mountainous county as having “a massive build-up of wildland fuels ready to burn.” It’s classified as nearly all “high” or “very high” on fire hazard severity risk maps. Most land is privately owned—and old wooden houses are “just another tree, as far as the fire’s concerned,” as Laurel Marcus, executive director of the nonprofit California Land Stewardship Institute, puts it. Landowners often struggle to maintain their forests: the county’s median household income is about $54,000 a year, 70 percent of the California average, and many residents are elderly. The cheapest way to introduce fire back into the system safely is through volunteer prescribed burn associations, but the local PBA has found scaling up challenging, says Jones.
The scary memory here is the Redwood Complex fire of 2017—a year that marked a new era in wildfires for California. The Redwood tore through 36,000 acres just northeast of Ukiah, burned over 500 structures, and killed nine people. The August Complex of 2020, in the Mendocino National Forest, burned an area the size of Delaware. The Russian River watershed has burned in a “piecemeal” way, Jones says, but it’s been spared from a Caldor- or Dixie-size fire.
“People are definitely on edge and concerned about it,” says Scott Cratty, executive director of the Mendocino Fire Safe Council. “Strangely enough, that doesn’t necessarily translate into knowing anything about the right thing to do about it.” In inspections, he’s seen homeowners who have bulldozed their trees—“the reason they moved here in the first place”—but left piles of greasy rags or cardboard boxes near their houses. People let juniper grow under their eaves, use bamboo fencing. A lesson from the Paradise fire was that “one of the big drivers of whether your house burns down or not is whether your neighbor’s burns down.”
Yet people sometimes get prickly about spending public money on private land, Cratty says. It’s often easier to get funding—and permission—for fuels projects deep in the forest. But “what matters the most is what happens on homes and right around homes,” Cratty says. “We need to start with the community and work out.” So, much of the new Ukiah crew’s work will be conducting defensible-space inspections and projects, and creating or maintaining fuel breaks. And it will work on making egress for east-side residents that presently only have one road in and out. Anything the city does to make itself less likely to burn can reduce fire risks to the surrounding forest, Jones says—even if “it’s not a landscape-level resiliency project.”
The fish and the fire
When Mendocino’s forests burn, which they will definitely do, and if the fire is big and hot, it’s probably bad news for the fish. One preview might be the 2020 Wallbridge Fire, which burned part of the Russian watershed southeast of Ukiah. Fish biologist Mariska Obedzinski remembers it. She surveys the coho salmon that spawn in tributaries lower down in the watershed and are “on life support,” that people have poured money into saving, and that have made modest gains in the past two decades.
During the Wallbridge, some water rose to fish-killing temperatures. Suffocating sediment filled in the pools. Cars and structures burned on creek banks, sending toxic chemicals into the water—Russian Riverkeeper biologist Birkin Newell recalls trenching around burning Priuses and placing straw wattles to contain the chemicals, and Obedzinski’s team skipped their snorkel surveys post-fire because of the chemical concerns. Firefighters ran heavy equipment up streams-turned-firebreaks, destroying habitat. Later, burned streams lacked the shady tree cover that kept water cool, and salvage logging removed more trees that might have sheltered fish.
“There was so much destruction that could have been avoided if you had more controlled burning or thinning of forest, or just defensible space,” Obedzinski says.
Yet there were some benefits to it, she added. Water flows increased following the fire—perhaps because it had killed so many thirsty young firs. And Jones says that while some parts of the Wallbridge-burned forest are hurting, others look “so good”—“it was like a perfect fire.” Heterogeneity itself is a plus.
Marcus notes that Indigenous people burned this area in patches. “They didn’t burn everything all at once,” she says. “So the fish in that creek might not do so well, but the ones over there did. It’s having massive, million-acre wildfires that doesn’t really help.”
Wallbridge was lucky in weather terms, too—no rain. Here is the bad scenario: Last year, in far northern California, a rainstorm hit on the heels of the McKinney Fire, sending a flow of sediment and ash into the Klamath River that killed about 50 miles of the river’s fish. That’s what Obedzinski worries about.
What happens to the trees?
Back to the theoretical big hot fire. It wouldn’t be all bad. Chaparral grows back, hardwoods usually grow back. But conifers, especially Douglas firs that have taken over in an age of fire suppression, do not always grow back. And big stand-replacement fires (the apocalyptic kind) can homogenize the forest, Jones says. “You lose niches—so you lose wildlife diversity, you lose habitat, you lose resiliency,” he says. “The more homogenous your forest is, the more vulnerable it is to future disturbance, like climate and pests and diseases and fire.”
His biggest worry is that severely burned forests may convert into something that is not forest, and possibly “to something that’s completely invasive.” French broom is taking over: gorgeous but flammable, tedious to remove. Acacias love disturbance and are champion resprouters. Stands of giant Arundo reeds choke waterways. In the Sierras, about one-third of the burn footprint has now converted into something else, like grassland, Jones says. That hasn’t happened in the coastal forest yet. “My fear is that we cross a threshold.”
Mendocino forests, like much of California, could really use some prescribed fire. About 125,000 acres of California wildlands are burned each year, about one-tenth of the state’s million-acre goal. Ukiah’s proposal to burn 200 acres in five years prompted apparent skepticism from an expert who scored the grant proposal for the Forest Service: “The grant amount seems excessive if they only plan to treat 200 acres?”
But the amount is small because the obstacles are many, Hutchison and others say.
Above all, the forest is usually too dense to burn safely until it is cleared. At Doolin Canyon, Hutchison expects to spend a season or two on fuels work before burns can be done. Other obstacles: long or expensive environmental reviews, air quality permits, weather conditions, labor costs, landowners who want privacy, and landowners who are nervous. “I want to go big, I want to go hard. That’s how we reset the system and put fire back in,” Jones says. “But you can’t do that, right? Because people have their houses in places that make no sense. And that makes stewardship really, really challenging.”
“My hope is that we get as much prescribed fire as we can,” Hutchison says.
Getting buy-in, one landowner at a time
Whatever prescribed burns Ukiah can do with its new crew will, Jones and Hutchison hope, bring people along. “That creates more capacity to expand and to scale up outside of the urban spaces,” Jones says.
A prescribed fire in progress, on the edge of the Russian River watershed in Anderson Valley. “Until 2016 or 2017, we weren’t really managing it at all,” says landowner Kathy Borst. “We were using the wisdom of the current times—the forest knows what to do, just let it alone. That was particularly useless once these big fires started hitting.” She and her neighbors began to organize, educate themselves, and clear the understory, and in May 2023 a mostly volunteer crew came out to do this burn. (Tori Norville, University of California Cooperative Extension)
Last October, Jones and Kyle Farmer—a forestry and fire community educator for the cooperative extension, and a burn boss—checked in at the home of Kathy Borst, a Mendocino resident, where they had burned seven or so acres in the spring. It was Borst’s first prescribed burn. Jones and Farmer felt it had gone well. The fire had taken forever to light—not to mention all the prep work by hand. Then it had taken off, perhaps burning a bit hotter than ideal. Now these oak woodlands, interspersed with Douglas fir and redwoods, had been opened up. Strong crowns remained. A redwood was resprouting, triggered by the fire. But this was just a start. Jones and Farmer, and others like them, are still figuring out the right burn recipe—like how best to thin beforehand—and watching to see what grows back. “We need really brave, avant-garde landowners like this, that are willing to be the guinea pigs,” Farmer says.
The night after the burn, Borst told them, her 77-year-old husband had walked the fenceline with a flashlight, and came rushing back to the house. “He goes, ‘There’s a fire in one of the trees—come with me, we have to put it out.’ I’m like—‘You, me, night? Bad idea, honey.’ ” They called a younger neighbor to set a hose on it, and eventually it went out. A spark had caught inside the scar of a cat-faced tree. That was scary, Borst said. But she knew that tree would have been a worse liability in a big fire—a “damn torch in your yard.” She was delighted that the burn would make her forest safer. She would recommend it to her neighbors.
Elena Neale-Sacks contributed reporting to this story.
Support for this article was provided by the March Conservation Fund.
