On a Friday morning in early May, flames crawled up a mountainous slope above Highway 66 in the Greensprings. Smoke billowed above the road, nearly obscuring the people tending the fire: some wore official wildland fire gear, others dressed in jeans and t-shirts. But this wasn't a wildfire -- it was neighbors working together to protect their community.
The volunteers — a mix of firefighters, Greensprings residents, and fire experts with the Rogue Valley Prescribed Burn Association — were there to put “good fire” on a 12-acre triangle of land owned by Deb Evans and Ron Schaaf.
Earlier that morning, Jonathan Paul, a certified burn manager, briefed the crowd on what to expect. The parcel, a mix of oaks and conifers, would be burned in strips from the top of the mountain down to Highway 66.
“The pine needles are going to carry the fire,” explained Drake. “It will burn in a mosaic, and that’s okay.”
In fire-prone Southern Oregon, intentionally setting fire to a forested hillside might seem reckless, especially as summers have grown hotter and wildfire seasons more intense. But under the right conditions, fire can burn away vegetation that would otherwise fuel dangerous wildfires in warmer, drier months, helping protect homes and forests before the next wildfire strikes.
Now, a growing number of residents are learning how to use prescribed burns to make their communities safer.
The volunteers counted themselves off into teams of four. The firing team would handle ignition, using handheld canisters called drip torches that release a mix of fuel and flame. The other three crews, known as “holding” teams, would spread out with fire tools and watch to ensure flames and sparks didn’t touch off spot fires past the planned boundaries.
Staged nearby were 3000 gallons of water and four fire engines. Lengths of fire hose snaked through the center of the property. A strip of bare soil, dug to stop the spread of fire, marked the northwest flank.
The community has been preparing in other ways, too — hosting public meetings and presentations to explain the benefits of prescribed fire. Just three weeks earlier, many of these same folks had walked the property and reviewed the strategy.
Worried they wouldn’t have enough people, Evans and Schaaf called friends and neighbors the night before, personally inviting them to join. Now, watching dozens of neighbors heft tools and hike toward the staging area, Schaaf grinned.
“It’s a good day to burn,” he said.
Teaching prescribed burns
Greenspring residents are no strangers to fire. Most pile and burn dead tree limbs every season to reduce wildfire risk near their homes. But controlled understory burning, intentionally lighting low-intensity fires beneath forest canopies, is less common. Many people don’t understand how it works, said Aaron Krikava, organizer at Rogue Valley Prescribed Burn Association.
“It's just something that is done up in the woods by federal employees in yellow and green suits,” he said.
Krikava started his career removing small trees and shrubs with a chainsaw. Though he enjoyed the work and learning about fire ecology, he saw it as an incomplete solution.
“I started to recognize that oh, all this brush just grows back,” he explained. “Just doing this initial fuel reduction work isn't really making our homes safer and more resilient from wildfire in the long term.”
Fire can be used to effectively maintain ecosystems, but many landowners are unfamiliar with the practice or find it scary — and few can pull off a burn on their own. This is where prescribed burn associations, or PBAs, come in.
These groups bring together neighbors, firefighters, ecologists, and others who pool equipment, expertise and sweat equity to conduct controlled burns. PBAs are common in the Midwest and Southeast. The first PBA on the West Coast was founded in Humboldt County, California, in 2017.
“If they can do it down there, why don't we try and do it up here?” Krikava said. He began writing articles and op-eds for local newspapers and talking to firefighter friends. Rogue Valley PBA formed in 2020 and held its first burn in the Applegate in 2021. Since then, they have completed 20 burns on private land across the Rogue Valley.
Rogue Valley PBA doesn’t charge for their services, although they do ask landowners to pay for fuel and provide snacks and beverages for the volunteers.
Community burns help demystify the process, Krikava said. “The intention is just to introduce the community to prescribed burning and get them to have a better idea of what it is.” Experiencing it firsthand, he said, can shift public perception and build support.
Just after 10:30 that morning, the volunteers crowded along the road as landowner Ron Schaaf tipped the drip torch, a canister with a flaming nozzle, and ignited the first strip of land. Flames climbed the slope, consuming twigs and leaves, sizzling as they encountered greener grass and shrubs. Soon, smoke obscured the road.
Holding crews fanned out with shovels and McLeods–heavy-duty rakes used to scrape away forest duff.
Krikava called out to the firing crew.
“The next person go three feet below him, and the next person three feet below them,” he said.
The volunteers staggered themselves down the slope, lines of flame trailing behind them.
The science and strategy of a safe prescribed burn
Prescribed burns require permits from the Oregon Department of Forestry and can only take place when conditions — including temperature, humidity, and wind speed — are safe but still allow the fire to spread adequately.
By noon, the sun had begun to poke through the clouds, and the firing crew had nearly reached the line of fire hoses that snaked through the center of the burn area. Evans checked a weather app on her phone: in less than two hours, the humidity had dropped from 52% to 32% — ideal for safe burning.
“You can tell when you’re dripping [with the torch] because [the fire] just takes off,” Evans said.
Evans and Schaaf purchased their 160-acre property in 1999. A timber company had clear-cut the land in the 1980s and replanted it with rows of evenly spaced ponderosa pines. During the recent drought, the trees started dying, especially along the rocky ridge.
The land sits at Greensprings Summit, where the Pacific Crest Trail crosses Highway 66. It’s a critical spot: a wildfire on Tyler Creek below will likely race uphill through their property before threatening the rest of the Greensprings community. “We’re the property that has to stop the fire,” Evans said.
The couple has used federal funding to thin their forest and reduce wildfire risk. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program, run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, helps landowners improve forest health, create wildlife habitat and reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires.
They hired local loggers to thin the pines and grind up or burn the leftover branches. Afterwards, Schaaf removed and burned the lower dead branches from the remaining trees.
They are not alone in preparing their property for wildfire.
Before the Greensprings was settled, forests here burned, on average, every 15 years. Over the last century, most fires have been actively suppressed.
Logging has altered the forest’s structure. Gone are the towering stands of sugar pine. In the absence of fire, white firs have grown in thickly. In recent years, these conifers have died by the hundreds, burdening many landowners with swaths of dead and highly flammable trees.
The Greensprings area was identified as a high priority for wildfire mitigation in 2017. Since then, approximately 4,000 acres of private property have been treated to lower fire risk, according to Peter Winnick, an NRCS agent who has helped many residents acquire grants.
Treatments are not “one and done,” Winnick said. They’re part of a long-term progression toward healthier, more resilient forests.
“You can either come back in with more chainsaws, you can come in with chemical spray, which no one really wants to use, or you can eventually figure out how to use prescribed good fire on the ground,” he said.
Much of Southern Oregon faces a high risk of catastrophic fire. That risk is amplified in places like the Greensprings, where homes sit at the edge of human development and the forest. The good news: a growing network of partners is working together to reduce that risk.
Projects like the enormous West Bear initiative between Talent and Jacksonville aim to reduce wildfire risk for properties in the wildland-urban interface, where homes meet the forest. The state forestry department’s southwest division has also begun conducting prescribed burns in the region, including a 70-acre burn near Butte Falls.
New laws are helping. Senate Bill 762, passed in 2021 in the wake of the 2020 Labor Day Fires, expanded the Certified Burn Manager program and established a new grant program to fund projects that reduce the wildfire risk on both public and private land. House Bill 4016, passed last year, provides up to $1 million in liability coverage for prescribed burns enrolled in the program.
Ross Ballou, fire planner at the forestry department, said communities must be patient as agencies take on more burns.
“A lot of this stuff is being figured out at every level, all the way from policy and liability to operational efficiencies,” Ballou said. “We're trying to do this right, and that takes a lot of time.”
The community that burns together
By midafternoon, the burn crew had worked their way down to Highway 66. A few stood by the edge of the road with drip torches extended, igniting the steep, grassy bank above them.
“Looking good; I’m happy with that,” said Paul, surveying the smoldering hillside. “After all that work, I’m super psyched that we finished all of it.”
Burning won’t just reduce the wildfire risk on these 12 acres; it should also improve the health of the forest. Fire coaxes native seeds to germinate, kills invasive weeds, keeps pest insects in check and spurs the growth of tender vegetation that attracts deer and other wildlife.
Drake and a small crew will stay on site until the fire is contained, and they will keep checking on it for three days, until it has been completely extinguished.
Meanwhile, Greensprings residents are already planning their next burn. The community event was empowering, said Valkyrie Liles, a volunteer firefighter who took part in the prescribed burn.
“Living in the Mountain West as I do, I spent a good number of years being afraid of fire,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “Every fire isn't a tragedy. Nature needs fire. Fire can restore life.”
Winnick, the NRCS agent, said this wildfire mitigation work brings communities closer in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
“All of a sudden, people realize they're in the same boat and this thing is much bigger than any of them,” Winnick said. “People pulling for each other and creating this community component — I didn't really see that coming.”
