Five years ago, both the Dixie Fire and Caldor Fire burned hundreds of thousands of acres across Northern California, cresting over the Sierra and forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate.
The Caldor Fire destroyed most of the rural community of Grizzly Flats, despite residents taking significant wildfire precautions. Residents continue to rebuild half a decade later, but deep scars still remain.
The realities and lessons of the Dixie and Caldor fires continue to be learned every year in California. Wildfires are growing hotter and more devastating, and state fire officials say they no longer use the term “wildfire season,” but rather “wildfire year.”
In these moments of crisis, it is critical to make sure that people are well-informed and prepared to handle the circumstances of disaster, but to also understand the risks.
For North State pyrogeographer Zeke Lunder, these wildfires marked a pivotal moment.
As the Dixie Fire burned, and unsatisfied with social media and other information pages, he launched The Lookout to provide more context and specificity around wildfires and firefighting efforts.
Lunder spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about the lessons he has taken away five years after these two blazes ignited.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
When you reflect on 2021, what stands out to you about the wildfire conditions that year?
Through the teens we were in deep drought; it ranged from severe, to extreme, to exceptional drought from about 2012 through 2018. So the forests, by the time we got to 2021, were incredibly stressed. That was compounding problems we have had. We're just putting out every fire for the last century. It was extreme fuel loading in the forest, and then when we get this extended drought we have more trees die. We didn't have much snowpack, and that opened up the high country to dry out quicker. It’s this perfect storm in 2021 of drought, climate change, a really low snow year, followed by wind.
I think when people talk about fire season being year-round, I don't really believe that's happening. So a lesson learned from 2021 for me is that we had really exceptional conditions that led to the Caldor and Dixie being enormous fires, but then this year we don’t have that. We have a really mild fire season in California.
Part of our mission with The Lookout is to help educate people on those subtleties because we feel like people who do live in the forest, in dangerous places, they can’t live in this extreme sense of fear all the time. If we tell people “fire season is a year-round thing,” it’s just paralyzing. People are afraid every time they leave their house that they might not see it again, when in reality 2021 was an exceptional year and our worst fires happen under exceptional conditions. It’s important for us to recognize when we're [also] not in extreme danger.
You started The Lookout during the Dixie Fire, why?
I'm from Lassen County, and have family in Plumas County. I used Facebook for a long time to share maps; I've spent my career making maps of large fires. It's kind of muscle memory in the middle of the summer to get up early, check the infrared overnight flight data, make some maps and share them with friends. But I felt like Facebook was not really a great venue for nuanced conversation about fire. We really need to have these nuanced conversations about how fire works in each place, so we don't throw out blanket solutions. I figured the best way to do that would be to start my own website, and it kind of took off.
I think what really made The Lookout happen, though, was the Caldor Fire. I was covering Dixie… it wasn’t a huge media market. A friend of mine said “you really should cover this fire in Tahoe." We covered the Caldor, and got a lot of donations from people that care about Tahoe, the Sierra Nevada. That helped us realize we could actually sustain a wildfire media company.
What tools and information do you think people should have, and use, to be knowledgeable about wildfires?
We've got a lot of links on [The Lookout] to a huge amount of information about fire hazard. When you drive down the road and see a sign that says “fire hazard is moderate today,” there's actually a lot of math [there]. We have weather stations all over the country, people going out and weighing the fuels, checking the fuel moisture. We have temperature graphs, and a huge amount of science that goes into deciding when to change that sign from moderate to high, to extreme. Another thing people can do is just talk to their local prescribed burn associations. Since 2021 there's been a lot of growth in the citizen burning movement including El Dorado County, Placer County, Butte County. It's a chance for people with zero fire experience to come out and learn how to burn, and in that you learn a lot about how fire works.
I think we need people who decide to move out into the woods to take some responsibility for learning about the conditions because Grizzly Flats is the norm, not the exception. All across the Sierra we've got these forest communities… most of them should never have been built in the first place. In the 1970s and 1980s people would log a chunk of forest land, and then they would subdivide it. Often those lots wouldn’t sell. All of these forest communities like Grizzly Flats have chronic problems that include not having enough landowners in the subdivision to keep the homeowners association funded, having vacant lots that no one’s taken care of. If you buy a lot in a forest community expecting that someone else is going to take care of the hazard around you, you're setting yourself up for that disaster.
Insurance now is providing some of the truth-telling that no one else has been able to provide. What we've seen in the last five years is that insurance companies are bailing out of a lot of these forest communities, and that is putting the brakes on people moving to the urban interface. But we encourage anyone who's thinking about moving up to the forest to retire, or just to get away from the heat, to do some research and learn about this.
The cavalry is not coming. The Forest Service can barely maintain their own campgrounds; their staff are being slashed by funding cuts; they're spending all their money on fire suppression. Expecting the Forest Service to thin the forest around your subdivision, they’ve got 30 million acres of forest in California that they need to deal with and it's simply not getting done. There's a lot of talk, a lot of planning, but the lack of implementation is a universal thing that's happening across the entire country.
In the five years since you’ve had The Lookout, do you think the public is better informed about wildfires?
I think it's really become part of the conversation now, it's on people's radar. We’re getting more used to it just being part of the landscape, and it’s always been there. Just the fact that it's burned so many of our communities in the last decade has really thrust it into our consciousness.