By Ken Levy
Active seniors who enjoy relaxing by a campfire at some of Idaho’s favorite campgrounds, or just out for a walk in the woods, will find the scenery has changed dramatically.
The face of many recreational sites in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) was badly damaged by the 2024 Wapiti fire. The Stanley Basin area was already severely impacted by the human-caused Bench Lake Fire in July 2023, which threatened Redfish Lake Lodge and closed the complex for a time, and threatened Stanley and the Stanley Lake area, until the blaze was doused and the threat removed.
The lodge was spared again, this time from damage from the Wapiti. Jeff Clegg, general manager at Redfish Lake Lodge, said none of the trees in or around the lodge or the campgrounds were affected. Seniors can still take advantage of fishing, relaxing on the shore of Redfish Lake, dining and renting a boat or kayak.
“The views and ‘feel’ from the lake and lodge remains the same as it always has been,” he said. “The western moraine has a ‘mosaic’ look when you are out on the lake. The main fire was behind the western moraine and is visible when hiking the Bench Lake trail” in the Sawtooth National Forest.
But it’s also more visible from many other areas farther into the forest. Nelson Mills, the timber and silviculture program manager for the SNF, said the lightning-caused Wapiti inferno tore through almost 130,000 acres. About 51,000 of those acres were in the Sawtooth National Forest. The Wapiti burned in the Boise, Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis national forests. All are experiencing major effects from the blaze.
But all is not lost
“I wouldn’t see a complete loss of recreation in the Stanley area,” Mills said. “People love and cherish the area. The places aren’t gone, they’re just different. It’s how it grows to the next cycle of its life that people who recreate in the Stanley Basin are used to is the main question.”
What they might have been “used to,” when it comes to dense forests, is not likely to return for generations. But the recreational opportunities are still there, Mills said, and there are 756,000 acres on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and 2.1 million acres overall on the Sawtooth.
“There’s plenty of places to go, especially if you’re a hiker or a skier or anybody getting up high, and for a family to go picnic, or drive and to camp,” the forester said.
Science and fire history
More than 1,450 wildfires consumed almost a million acres in the Gem State in 2024. Besides the Wapiti, other blazes of significant note included the Red Rock fire, about 15 miles west of Salmon, which burned more than 70,000 acres in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. The Boise National Forest saw about 300,000 acres go up in smoke.
The majority of the trees burned in the Wapiti blaze were lodgepole pine and serotinous lodgepole pine. The latter have cones that open up with heat and predominate in the Teton Basin and in the Yellowstone plateau. But in central Idaho, most lodgepole pines are non-serotinous, and the Wapiti fire consumed many of their cones.
“Some areas of the fire burned very hot, to the point that even in pockets of serotinous stands, their cones were fully consumed by fire,” Mills said.
The blaze also burned through areas that had previously burned, wreaking yet more havoc.
“Within the past 20 years we had five different wildfires on the Sawtooths alone, that the Wapiti fire then burned through again. These areas had seedlings growing naturally, post-fire, but the seedlings weren’t old enough to reproduce. So when they got burned the entire area that burned has no seed source left.”
That means the Forest Service needs to plant seedlings. Reforestation will take a lot longer, since there were 65,000 acres already in backlog for replanting.
“We’ll collect cones from our forest to then grow at our tree nursery, so they are native localized seed,” he said.
Dead material feeds the flames
Mature lodgepole pine stands in the Stanley Basin suffered about 60-80 percent mortality, killed anytime between 1998 to 2010 by mountain pine beetles, Mills said. That mortality leaves about 21 tons of dead fuel per acre, compared with about seven tons of dead material per acre in a normal functioning lodgepole pine stand.
“Our forest floors in the Stanley Basin are full of downed trees that all contribute to that fuel overloading on the ground. It is how this ecosystem functions. Lodgepole pine forests require stand replacement fire to reproduce,” Mills said.
The problem, he said, “is the scale and intensity of stand replacement fire that we’re seeing is beyond what is manageable.”
Mills said forest managers accept that fire is part of the ecosystem. Fire management includes rehabilitation, restoration and resilience, with age class diversity a major key. This is accomplished by thinning out forest stands through logging, small tree thinning, and harvesting lodgepole pine outside of burn areas through timber sales.
“The goal is to create small patches of openings where we can grow young growth, mixed in with some intermediate growth and mature trees and then introducing prescribed fire into the ecosystem and creating more diversity in areas where we can manage for species diversity,” Mills said.
Regeneration
A large part of the valley has experienced stand replacement fire in lodgepole pine, “and in the short term we’ve gotten rid of that fuel. It’s burned, it’s consumed. We are going to expect some natural regeneration. We’ll get baby trees growing, and we see wildflowers coming up in the next year or two up there,” he said, including fireweed and arrowleaf balsamroot, among other very common flowering plants. Some forests see blooming white spiraea, snowbrush, pinegrass and more in the time following a conflagration.
“After a while, the area can see woody vegetation in the form of shrubs and trees as live pine seedlings will start growing thick in the decades to come after the fire,” Mills said. “There will be some areas where vegetation may not get established right away. Those are areas that we’re focused on trying to give reforestation.” ISI
