Editor's note: Clackamas County tree farmer, Jon Stewart, now lives in Central Oregon.

After managing our family tree farm in Clackamas County for the past 25 years and working for the Mt. Hood National Forest since 1974, I recently accepted a transfer to the Deschutes National Forest. We purchased a home in Sunriver, well aware of the danger of living in the pine forests of Central Oregon.

I spent the early days of my Forest Service career parachuting out of planes to fight fires within a few miles of where I now live. Fire is a necessary part of this ecosystem and it is impossible to ignore the danger during the peak of the summer with air tankers flying overhead, smoke clouding the horizon and thousands of visitors pouring into Central Oregon. Add ignition sources like afternoon thunderstorms and arsonists and every few years we are bound to lose a few homes along with a few thousand acres of our national forests unless clear preventive action is taken. Needless to say I pay a premium price for fire insurance on my home and have our family photo albums packed in a suitcase ready for instant evacuation.

Within the last decade major forest fires have advanced on Bend from three different fronts and burned many fine homes far more valuable than mine. These local catastrophes have underlined the danger of wildfires to everyone living in Central Oregon. Residents in this part of the state are much more supportive of forest practices that deal with the underlining insect and disease problems that create flashy fuel beds that support these wildfires. Communities like Sunriver are proactive in dealing with their forest fire hazards and recently have won awards for their active forest management.

Sunriver, the community within which my wife and I now live, has a fuel abatement program with trees both on private and community property actively being thinned and pruned to keep a ground fire from climbing up into their crowns. All woody debris is collected and either chipped and burned to prevent the build up of fire hazards within the community. Even the bitter brush, which supports our winter deer herds, is cut and removed to create fire safe corridors. In addition, the community actively supports Forest Service thinning, spring burning and mowing activities on our public lands adjacent to Sunriver because they recognize the advantage of having fire defenses in depth.

One surprising result is the Deschutes National Forest currently harvests more timber than any national forest in the Pacific Northwest. This harvest activity is driven by forest health concerns — particularly the mountain pine beetle which has killed thousands of acres of pine throughout Central Oregon. The benefits of this active management was underlined late this September when on a hot summer afternoon with dry westerly winds blowing at 20 miles an hour, a fire broke out four miles west of Sunriver.

Arson is suspected as the cause of the fire. Lava Butte Lookout, about six miles northeast of the River Forest Butte forest reported a smoke column four miles due west of Sunriver. Fortunately Bill Bickers, an experienced smokejumper with over a quarter century of experience fighting fires in Central oregon was the first to respond. By proximity and experience he immediately became the on-the-ground fire boss. By the time Bill arrived, less than 20 minutes after the fire had been reported, the fire had already climbed into the crowns of the forest and was sprawling across the landscape in all directions. It was roaring through thickets of 60 to 80 year old timber and moving steadily eastward, like a dozen roaring freight trains backed by a battleship's cannonade as tree after tree vaporized in smoke and flame. A huge column of smoke boiled eastward shrouding the three communities of Sunriver, Crosswaters and River Forest in mid-day gloom.

Bill immediately notified the fire chief in Sunriver by radio and an alert was posted on the local television as the Sunriver police prepared for a possible evacuation. The fire chief notified his staff that if the fire reached the summit of River Forest Butte, over 7,000 people living and recreating in Sunriver that late summer afternoon were to be immediately evacuated. Bill recognized the danger of this fire as ice crystals formed on the top of the smoke column rising seven thousand feet into the sky above his head. To an experienced firefighter like Bill, these ice crystals portend the possibility of the fire creating its own thunderhead. These anvil shaped clouds can create hammer blows of devastating downdrafting winds, winds which can blow the fire in any direction doubling and tripling the size of the fire in a few minutes. This hazard was reinforced when Bill monitored radio reports of a thunderstorm twenty miles to the south near Crescent with turbulent winds of up to 30 miles per hour.

Within a half an hour the fire had grown to 60 acres and as Bill scouted the fires on the ground, he realized that he could not commit ground forces to the flank of the fire because of thick timber and swirling, gusting winds. He did however request all available local fire engines, fire crews to stand by and, most importantly, three airtankers to attack the fire's flanks. No air tankers were available in Central Oregon, but after Bill's urgent request, airplanes flying fires near Reno, Medford and La Grande were immediately diverted to the Spring Butte Fire.

The airtankers began dropping retardant on the flanks of the fire within twenty minutes after Bill's call was received. This provided a toe hold for the ground crews and fire engines to begin working on the flanks of the fire, but the head of fire continued moving rapidly up hill and due east towards the summit of Spring River Butte – less than three miles west of Sunriver. As the fire crowned through mature ponderosa and lodge pole pine flame lengths easily reached 200 feet and a huge column of smoke shrouded homes along the Deschutes River.

Then as suddenly as it had began the crown fire collapsed and fell back down on the ground. Within minutes airtankers were able to drop retardant at the fire's head and by dark the airtankers had encircled the fire with retardant drops. By the following morning, after working through the night by the light of the fire's glow, firefighting crews supported by tractors and fire engines had contained the fire at 260 acres.

What had so suddenly stopped this catastrophic wildfire? Within a week after the fire, community leaders, the fire chief and police chief from the Sunriver community joined Forest Service personnel — including myself — to find out. The point of origin, just a few hundred feet from a well travelled forest road, was obvious. Behind it and stretching in a widening quarter mile arc to the east a thick bed of smoking ash studded with the black trunks of ponderosa pine and lodge pole 60 to 120 feet high marked the fire's trajectory. Charred trunks, two to five feet apart, stood vertically in bleak, lifeless thickets and ash trails of fully consumed logs crisscrossed the ground.

But as we drove to the head of the fire through boiling clouds of pumice dust and ash, the forest changed. The boles of the thick ponderosa pine were still charred, but fifty to sixty feet above green needles painted a dusty red with retardant dropped by the airtankers glowed in the azure sky. These trees stood 25 to 30 feet apart in a parklike setting and beneath them were the flat sawn stumps of a thinned and well managed forest. No telltale ash trails of burnt logs etched the forest floor. There had been no thickets of dead and dying trees to carry the fire up into these 100 foot ponderosa pines and their thick bark resisted the fire's heat because there was no heavy fuel on the ground to hold the heat. Unlike their relatives just a few hundred feet away that stood as stiff black needless sentinels in a smoky sky, these trees were still alive and green, only their thick bark lighted singed by a passing grass fire. The aerial retardant dropped by the air tankers had found space to sift through the forest canopy, reach the forest floor — effectively buying time for the ground crews to come in and build a fireline to contain the fire.

The thinning that helped stop this fire had occurred almost a decade before the start of the Spring Butte Fire, but it had worked its magic and was the cornerstone to stopping a wildfire that could have easily grown to a massive conflagration and consumed Sunriver.

After the thinning which had produced saw logs for the local mills and firewood for the local residents, summer Youth Conservation Crews — high school youth 15 to 18 years of age – had piled the logging slash. In the fall, after the first rain, Forest Service personnel, led by visionaries like Bill Bickers, had burned these piles. This thinning, piling and burning effectively destroying the thick fuel bed of dead trees and decaying slash that had fueled the inferno that had burned everything in its path a few hundred feet to the west.

The Spring Butte Fire underlined the critical importance of using good forest practices and having the critical trained fire fighting resources available to help provide defenses in depth for the communities of Central Oregon. True, the fire had burned through prime wildlife habitat and totally destroyed critical wildlife cover for elk, deer and other game, but a mosaic of thinnings and shaded fuel breaks had worked their magic and stopped the fire before it could grow into a thousand acre incident consuming everything in its path.

The Spring River Butte Fire showcased that thoughtful forest management is an incredible fire fighting tool. My friends and neighbors who live in Sunriver and my co-workers with whom I work clearly saw the difference on that smoky afternoon in late September and were impressed by what we saw. The real payback for me came a few weeks later when the Environmental Committee at Sunriver appropriated $15,000 to help support one Youth Conservation Corps crew to pile slash on national forest lands within five miles of Sunriver next summer.

The Spring Butte Fire underlined for them that the health and safety of our community depends on the healthy and fire resistant natural communities surrounding us. The members of my new community in Sunriver clearly recognize that our national forest cannot be ignored, but must be carefully managed with all the tools and skills we have gained from over a century of forestry. And most importantly, they are willing to invest in the next generation to make sure that they gain that knowledge in the most effective way possible by accomplishing critical hands-on work!