Renewal Lesson at Mountain Camp

When the sixth-graders first began their conservation classes at the San Diego city schools camp on Palomar Mountain last week, everyone raised their hands when asked if they thought all forest fires are bad and should be put out as soon as they begin.

After all, on the way to the outdoor camp, their buses drove up past blackened hillsides. They had been charred last month when dry winds fanned a small trash-burning fire into a 15,000-acre blaze that swept across the mountainous North San Diego County area. But after the group spent some time walking around the pine and oak forests near the camp, the students gained a new perspective on fire and nature. They found new grass and seedlings already sprouting from burned areas of chaparral; they discovered that most trees were not badly damaged; they helped clear underbrush as a way to keep a beneficial fire from becoming one more devastating, and they learned that fire often serves as nature’s way of rejuvenating a mature forest.

As the children walked back to their cabins, not one raised his or her hand when their teachers once again asked whether they think fires are all bad.

The special curriculum on fire and nature was instituted a couple of weeks ago by the camp staff, which had brainstormed on how to take advantage of the October fire during the two weeks the camp was closed and they were stuck in San Diego.

The camp mixes teaching of the outdoors with extensive race/human relations instruction. Sixth graders from two schools are brought up each week on schedules that deliberately bring a multiethnic flavor to the wilderness.

In essence, the new conservation curriculum tries to show the students that forest fires are more complex than their image of unmitigated destructiveness as seen through the popular figures of Smokey the Bear and Bambi. The students learn what botanists and rangers have talked about for years, but which has never fully dented the general public’s view of such fires as terrible disasters because of the damage they wreak on private property.

“I had worked at two other camps where there had been fires and we would take kids around and show them where manzanita and other plants would begin rejuvenating soon after the fire,” said veteran outdoors teacher Sue Kerchenfaut, who drew up a research paper for the other camp members. “So I thought that (the October fire) offered a good chance to show students what happens after a fire.”

Camp teacher Yvonne Conrad explained to children from Sherman Elementary School and Marston Middle School last week that the fire, in large part, worked the way nature intended, even though it was caused by a grove foreman whose burnings of avocado trimmings got out of hand.

“The fire burned with great ferocity, taking up everything in its path as it came up the mountain,” Conrad said in a brief classroom discussion before guiding the students into the forest. “But in general it burned things along the ground--chaparral and other low-growing plants that serve as fuel--and did not do a lot of crowning, or burning of trees.

“Some trunks were burned but most trees escaped serious damage and already in one grove down the mountain, 50% of the trees are shooting leaves again.”

Until this century, forest fires were touched off by lightning or by Indians who watched the beneficial effects that took place from lightning. Mature growth that burned was soon replaced by new, more productive stands of chaparral, which in turn attracted new wildlife and provided more nutrients for trees that remained undamaged. Chaparral seeds require hot temperatures from a fire in order to break open and take root.

Because such fires occurred with regularity, only portions of the underbrush would burn, leaving other plants to continue growing, illustrating nature’s way of limiting damage while beginning new growth cycles. But along with the creation of national forests and the growing presence of rural homes and communities came increased firefighting activity with the goal of suppressing all fires as quickly as possible. That philosophy was summed up in Smokey the Bear’s admonition to prevent all forest fires.

All Fires Shouldn’t Be Stopped

Yes, too many people-caused fires are bad but not all fires should be stopped, Bill (Wild Bill) Stevens told another class. “So instead of a 30-year or 50-year cycle, we created a 100-year cycle (in the case of Palomar Mountain) and that means that when a fire does occur, it can get so bad and really do serious damage to the forest.”

And contrary to the Bambi story, where all the forest animals perished in a fire, almost all fires move slow enough so that forest animals can escape to unscarred areas.

“We’ve seen more deer around the camp since any time in the past five years or more,” Kerchenfaut said, because the animals have moved from fire-scarred areas. And rabbits, which haven’t been seen on top of the mountain for almost two decades, are back in large numbers, waiting for their habitats to recover at the lower elevations.

As Conrad’s group walked on the periphery of a burned area, they saw how a fire break is intended to slow a fire, by having firefighters burn all the brush in a target area so that when the fire reaches there, it finds no fuel and will have to change direction.

On another trail, the group saw new shoots of bunch grass sprouting from a burned area but threatened now by erosion because soil loosened by the fire is washed down hillsides from recent rains. Conrad showed deer tracks to the excited kids along a rivulet of flowing soil.

“The deer like to use trails or anything resembling them,” she said. “So they will start using this rivulet to go up and down the mountain” in another beneficial consequence of the fire.

Stevens had his students chop and clear away underbrush on a hill above the camp as a way of simulating what nature would normally do through small periodic fires. “So if a fire does ever come through this area, it will have less fuel than otherwise and not be as serious,” he said. The hill has progressively taken on a less dense appearance as students week after week thin out mature chaparral and other low-growing plantings.

“You are doing something similar to controlled burns by the rangers,” Stevens said to the class, “which also eliminates undergrowth and leaves trees.”

The staff will adapt the curriculum to the constantly changing conditions at Palomar throughout the year, Kerchenfaut said. As fire-damaged trails are reopened to student hikes this winter and spring, teachers will be able to point out plant regeneration to their classes. Even in subsequent years, nature’s recovery from the fire will continue to be evident, she said.