Lost Creek Wildfire study—conclusions leap past supporting data

David McIntyre, Columnist

The 2003 Lost Creek Wildfire captured the attention of society, perhaps particularly among Crowsnest Pass residents who lived in close proximity to its advances into the headwaters of the Crowsnest River.

What's happening on this landscape today? Is post-Lost Creek Wildfire research being twisted to rationalize a new brand of commercial logging in the headwaters of the Oldman Watershed?


The University of Alberta (UofA) began a post-fire study that, still in progress, purports to define the impact of this fire. It does not accomplish this objective. I have no qualms with the data obtained by the UofA, but wish to express the bulletproof observation that the study, which attributes data differences between burned and unburned watersheds to the fire—and only the fire—is misleading. Why? Because it fails to record the differences between watersheds prior to the fire and, similarly, fails to define, for example, the compounding and sediment-generating effects created by pre-fire roads and other disturbances on the post-fire landscape.

I've attended two UofA presentations that reported the effects of the fire. My primary problems with the study are:

1. No pre-fire data exist to serve as a baseline measure; and
2. the post-fire data analysis examined, among other watercourses, Lyons Creek, a stream long known as an atypically turbid, dirty tributary of the Crowsnest River. The fact that, post-fire, this stream is still dirty and seen injecting plumes of sediment into the Crowsnest River—as it did before the fire—is not eyeopening, meaningful, nor scientifically significant.

The UofA's presentations make Lyons Creek's post-fire sediment loads appear surprising, stunning, even sensational. One researcher describing the creek in the wake of the fire, said, "It was puking sediment."

The UofA is comparing, post-fire, a historically dirty stream (Lyons Creek) within a burned watershed to an unburned watershed in which the stream (Star Creek) is historically known to run clear and clean,  … and then pointing an accusatory finger at the Lost Creek Fire as the reason for the profound difference between sediment loads in the two streams.

This is not science. It's hype and semi-informed conjecture.

Why has Lyons Creek run dirty for its observed history? I don't have a comprehensive answer, but it's likely to be found in the watershed's erodible soils and, perhaps most significantly, in the land's maze of roads. Roads are the primary producers of sediment, and the Lyons Creek drainage, even before firebreaks were bulldozed during the Lost Creek Wildfire, was heavily roaded. So, too, were other watersheds within the burned landscape. Regardless, society will never know, with certainty, the fire's impact on sediment loads because no pre-fire data exist—there's nothing against which the post-fire data can be measured.

I'm disturbed, too, by the UofA's incendiary rhetoric. Describing the Lost Creek Wildfire as hitting like a "nuclear bomb," and saying, "we need to avoid wildfires and manage the landscape" promotes fear, fosters misunderstanding and circumvents truth.

It is not possible to eliminate wildfires.

Perhaps the Lost Creek Wildfire's greatest legacy was in showing the Government of Alberta just how dangerous and fraught with peril its costly fire suppression efforts are, and how frighteningly effective they are—over time and across a vast landscape—in creating extreme, interconnected fuel loads. Looking within this picture, it's alarming to contemplate that society has likely paid more than one billion dollars in Eastern Slopes management costs to achieve, today, an outcome that, while beneficial to the century-long production of low value forest products (if wildfire can be prevented), is threatening to society as a whole.

The UofA study of the Lost Creek Wildfire is actually a study that, in addition to ignoring naturally occurring differences in watercourses, reflects more than a century of cumulative effects in which fire is a single component. It's the UofA's blindsided focus on the fire that bothers me, and causes me to ask this: Was the study part of a preconceived plan to vilify the wildfire and condemn it in a way that could then be used to promote a new brand of commercial logging?

The Calgary Herald (Nov. 24, 2012) reports that the UofA "will now look at the impact of tree harvesting and compare it to the impacts of fire." Also, there's this, within an article on the UofA website: "The next phase of this project, the comparative effect of several harvesting strategies … will be studied in a paired catchment study using the two reference watersheds."

In other words, the UofA seems to be a partner in a cryptic plan to create new headwaters disturbances in either North York Creek and/or Star Creek in order to monitor the resultant degradation. (Note: It's my recollection that ESRD's 20-year plan precluded logging on at least part of this precise landscape, and I believe this was done to demonstrate the province's commitment to a grizzly bear recovery plan.)

Is the UofA working hand-in-hand with ESRD Forestry Division in an attempt to log more of this province's critical headwaters landscape in the name of pseudo-science? Is the UofA proposing to have Spray Lake Sawmills create new roads within a landscape that is already so degraded by sediment-producing roads that Alberta's native bull and cutthroat trout (species at risk) receive increasingly elevated risk status each time their situation is reviewed?

David McIntyre
ravensview@toughcountry.net

David McInyre Bio:

I am a forest science graduate with a post-graduate degree (MSc in Environment and Forest Resources) from the University of Washington (Seattle). More than thirty years ago I began twenty years of work for the Smithsonian Institution by authoring, organizing and leading a ten-day study tour of forestry and forest practices. The tour took place across Oregon, Washington and BC. More recently, the authors (Sharpe and Hendee) of Introduction to Forest and Renewable Resources, asked me to edit the most recent edition of their highly successful university textbook.
Between these broad benchmarks, I’ve donated a great deal of forest inventory data to Alberta ESRD, and provided additional data via contract. Of note, I have apprised ESRD of the existence of naturally occurring, never-before-reported-in-Alberta ponderosa pines and western white pines, and inventoried hundreds of previously undocumented western redcedars.