Page 72 - Southern Oregon Magazine Summer 2021

the good life | great outdoors
WE CAN MAKE A

DIFFERENCE FOR

THE FUTURE!

bryant helgeland

ummer is here and that means camping season.

We’ve been cooped up for a year trying to stay healthy and alive.
SI don’t know about you, but I want to get out there and enjoy
somewhere more scenic than my house! Don’t get me wrong,
I love my house, but the great outdoors is a lot more picturesque.
There isn’t much better than sleeping under the stars, hanging out at
the edge of a body of water, swimming to cool off, and cooking over a
fire. Nothing reminds me more of camping and summer fun than the
smell of a campfire. A grill comes close, but isn’t the same. This sum-
mer, though, the grill is going to have to suffice. This is not the year for
a campfire!

We lost much of Talent and Phoenix last year in the Almeda. We almost
lost Ashland too. Granted, there is a silver lining in that the greenway is
now fire-safe for at least the next few years, but let’s not do that again.
I got stuck on the “wrong side” of the fire and had to sleep in my office
for a week. Too many people fared worse. Too many lost everything and
are having to start over. The fire was a painful lesson and a wake-up call.
Let’s learn from our mistakes. Some of the lessons we can take to heart
and implement ourselves, like not having campfires when the condi-
tions are too dangerous to do so safely.

True, the Almeda fire was not directly related to “camping” in the sense
that most of us are looking forward to this summer, but incidents like
it are all too common in wilderness areas. I’ve come across too many
smoldering campfires in abandoned campsites in my time and realisti-
cally speaking, I’m not really that old despite what my past injuries have
to say about things. I also took to heart the lessons of Leave No Trace and
have lived by those principles ever since. It definitely took a little time
to get used to camping without a fire but you do get used to it.

Other lessons we learned aren’t something we can tackle directly, but
that we all need to collectively push for. Over 100 years of fire suppres-
sion on public and private lands have left the forest ecology dangerously
out of whack. Fire suppression was the goal but it worked too well,
and now we’re seeing the results. Trees are way too densely packed on
a significant percentage of forest lands in the West. As we’ve learned
lately, native people had the right idea in including fire in overall for-
est management and health. The understory needs to be cleared out
periodically or we end up in the situation where we now find ourselves.
That overgrown understory becomes ladder fuel that allows manage-
able ground fires to climb into large-scale devastating crown fires. We
need to get back to a healthy forest, but fires alone won’t get us there.

We need to use all the tools in the toolbox. As much as I’m a “tree-hug-
ger,” I understand the need for logging. That said, there is good logging