Summer on the Edge of a Fire

Summertime at Crescent Lake usually involves day trips to Simax Beach, languid afternoons boating on clear, blue-green water, and week after week of visitors to the dozens of cabins that line its western shores.

Just down the road from its more popular big sister, Crater Lake, Crescent Lake likewise offers stunning views and a cool reprieve in a naturally glaciated basin nestled within the Deschutes National Forest and bordering the Diamond Peak Wilderness.

People who find its shores often return. A nearby community, Crescent Lake Junction, boasts a population of just over 3,000.

Kim Audova and her husband Andrew first visited Crescent Lake on Valentine’s Day 2020. With the world on the precipice of shutdown and their nest very close to empty after raising seven kids, the two decided to go all in on their dream of building a log cabin near a lake. A “once in a lifetime” adventure, as Audova characterized it. After years of building and overcoming COVID-era supply chain hurdles, the cabin was ready. By summer 2023 the couple had expanded their dream from a log cabin for themselves to a bed and breakfast for Crescent Lake visitors. Reservations were rolling in for fall and through summer 2024.

“All we need is one summer,” Audova told her husband, “and we’re going to make it.”

Then the fire happened.

A lightning storm on July 17 sparked multiple fires in the forest west of Crescent Lake, setting off what would eventually be named the Red Fire, along with the 208 Fire and Moss Mountain Fire — part of the South Willamette Complex. Ninety days later, all three are still burning. They are the longest-burning fires statewide this year, according to a Source Weekly analysis of the most recent data available from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, the region’s resource coordination center for wildland fires.

To date, Crescent Lake and its sandy shores remain closed. Lakefront cabins are shuttered. Many in the greater Crescent Lake community believe the U.S. Forest Service is to blame for the extended closures. They say that the fire was mismanaged from the start, that firefighters weren’t aggressive enough in attacking it head on and that the $27 million spent fighting the fire was used up creating an extensive shaded fuel break that they don’t trust will protect their community from this fire – or another that may come their way.

Those who work for Deschutes National Forest, and the management teams that have cycled through fighting the fire since its inception, say the Red Fire is in tricky terrain and hail the contested shaded fuel break as a success. With resources stretched thin in a historically active fire season and given the location and relative calm activity of the Red Fire, Forest Service personnel say firefighters had to pivot from trying to put out the fire to focusing instead on securing areas for future battles and community safety.

It’s an unpopular tradeoff, but one that may need to be made more often as climate change increases this fire season’s length, intensity and outbreaks.

Initial Attacks and Indirect Decisions

Soon after lightning struck the forest on July 17, smokejumpers dropped from planes to battle the fires it set off.

“For a little while they were making some good progress,” said Kevin Larkin, deputy forest supervisor for the Deschutes National Forest. “They thought they were going to be able to catch it and keep it small but then it just…conditions changed, something happened, and it started acting up in a way that they didn’t feel safe doing what they were doing. The fire itself was moving on them.”

Larkin said an expert incident command team was brought in within a couple of days to assess the fire. They came to the same conclusion: it wasn’t safe to put firefighters on the ground in a “big line right along the flaming front.” Instead of going directly at the fire, they would need to create a place where they could safely fight while keeping the fire within the boundaries of the wilderness.

The reason for keeping it within the wilderness was two-fold, according to Larkin. First, the 1964 Wilderness Act — which established a national preservation system for wilderness-designated areas – directs managing entities like the Forest Service to use minimally invasive suppression tactics within its boundaries when possible. And second, the difficult terrain in the wilderness convinced them it was safest to work on the outskirts. Allen Briggs, an incident commander with the last complex incident management team assigned to the Red Fire, said that the obstacles in the wilderness for direct attack were many, including steep slopes, dead and down trees and jack rot (a colloquial term for tree decay).

“We took what weren’t necessarily direct actions on the fire,” Larkin said about the approach over the last few months. “We did take a few, but we didn’t have people directly right on the fire line every day. What we were doing was preparing a shaded fuel break — place where we felt we could fight the fire when the fire approaches.”

The Break

Fuel breaks are an increasingly common firefighting technique. They’re created in areas where “fuels,” i.e. trees, shrubs and other vegetation are cleared or reduced to slow or stop fire spread and provide firefighters with a safe place to attack a fire’s front with retardant drops, water and backfiring. However, their use, according to studies, can be controversial and lacks standardized best practices.

“Despite the recent interest in these cleared zones, questions regarding construction, maintenance and effectiveness remain,” a 2019 study from the United Nations Office For Disaster Risk Reduction found. “For instance, a tricky challenge is to determine accurately the width of a fuel break required to prevent firefighters from injuries.”

In California, Briggs said there are several examples where a fuel break helped save communities. Earlier this year, the Canyon Fire was burning near Tuolumne, about an hour and a half outside of Yosemite National Park, when it rapidly grew overnight, leading to evacuations of over 500 homes. A 1.9-mile shaded fuel break running through a housing development provided a place for firefighters on the ground to anchor and hold the fire’s forward progress through the night until aerial support could help the next morning, according to a post-survey of the fire by Tuolumne FireSafe Council, a nonprofit that aims to reduce fire risk for the nearby community. A shaded fuel break retains a mix of vegetation, while a traditional fuel break is cleared of vegetation.

Likewise, in 2023 a unique case study by scientists at the University of California-Irvine titled, “Quantifying the effectiveness of shaded fuel breaks from ground-based, aerial, and spaceborne observations,” looked at the effectiveness of a break following the 2020 Creek Fire in the Sierra Nevada forest.

The study’s authors found that within the shaded fuel break there was significantly less damage to the tree crown, the burn severity was five times lower and the vegetation health was three times greater than directly outside of the break. However, the authors wrote, other studies show that fuel breaks are effective at stopping wildfires in less than half of fire events and that where they are successful, it’s largely due to the accessibility they create for firefighters to go in and fight the fire. To stay effective, fuel breaks must be maintained.

At Crescent Lake, firefighters spent months creating a 10-mile-long shaded fuel break on the western shoreline of Crescent Lake to Summit Lake on the west, and the tip of Odell Lake to the north. This break, which Briggs said is hundreds of feet wide in areas, was an expensive undertaking. (The exact amount spent is not clear, as cost estimates were not provided and a public records request for expenditures has yet to be filled.)

“The mechanical treatment that was performed in that fuel break required all types of heavy equipment,” Briggs said. “From timber, fellers [feller bunchers], dump trucks, guys on the ground using chainsaws and hand tools…all of that equipment costs a lot.”

Briggs and Larkin say that extensive fuel break – if maintained properly – will protect the area for years to come, as they’ve been shown to do in the California cases.

Many who live nearby doubt the break’s effectiveness and are angry at having been kept from the lake and its cabins, beaches and surrounding wilderness for months on end. Initially, the fire was in the wilderness north west of the lake but as it grew it moved down toward Crescent Lake’s western shoreline. The reason the entire area was closed off, according to Larkin, is largely because the Forest Service didn’t feel it would be able to keep the western side secured if people had access to the lake.

For the nearby community, the decision to attack the fire indirectly and close off all lake access meant an abrupt end to high tourism traffic and a new, ever-present worry precipitated by smoke plumes visible from their homes.

Mounting Frustrations

The term “full suppression” is bandied about by experts and laymen alike when talking about firefighting, and yet its meaning is muddy. At community meetings held in the weeks following the Red Fires’s start, Forest Service representatives told attendees they would use a “full suppression strategy” to fight it. That mirrored what I heard initially from Larkin as well.

“This one has been full suppression the entire time,” Larkin said on our first call about the Red Fire in early October. With follow-up questions, he clarified that “full suppression” meant they were actively working on the fire – not that they were working directly to extinguish it.

“They lied to the public by telling the public they we’re doing full suppression,” wrote Don Kearney in an email to the Source Weekly. Kearney has lived in the area for over half a decade and has worked as a wildland firefighter and in the logging industry. “Full suppression means you go to the fire to build fire lines and you put the fire out. What they did is called the big box. In the big box you build the shaded fuel break and let everything inside the box burn. That’s exactly what they did,” he wrote.

According to the National Interagency Coordination Center, which produces reports nationwide on wildfire activity, “full suppression,” “implies an overall strategy to ‘put the fire out’ as efficiently and effectively as possible while providing for firefighter and public safety.” Going by the agency’s own definitions of suppression strategies, the approach on the Red Fire reads more like a confine approach, “…a strategy of restricting a wildfire to a defined area, primarily using natural barriers that are expected to restrict the spread of the wildfire under the prevailing and forecasted weather conditions.”

In a private Facebook page, Friends of Crescent Lake, Oregon, Kearney’s frustrations are echoed among the roughly 3,000 members, many who say they too were told that the strategy was “full suppression.” Numerous comments, going back months, indicate that people understood that to mean the fire would be put out and not just managed until a season-ending weather event moved through.

“I think that the Red Fire should be dispatched the same way that the 805 was,” said Dennis Erickson, a Crescent Lake resident, referring to a small fire that started near the Red Fire on July 17. “I’m not the least bit convinced that it can’t be fought directly.”

Rob DeHarpport, who also lives nearby – by his estimates, about 3.3 miles from the fire’s current edge — says that for him the proximity of the fire to homes is the biggest concern, and best argument for more aggressive attacks on the flames directly.

“Had we got a sustained west wind I wouldn’t be talking to you from my home here,” DeHarpport said. “It’s a game of Russian roulette with a community and a fire. Especially when you consider August and the fact that the fires were mellowing out all over the West and there were available crews.”

By mid-August those closest to the fire had spent a month at Evacuation Level 1, the lowest-level evacuation warning, and the threat of high heat or a wind event was front of mind. But August, usually the peak of fire season, this year brought cooler temperatures, higher humidity levels and some much-needed rain to the region — changes that locals hoped would mean an opportunity for firefighters to reassess and go after the fire directly.

The strategy, however, did not change and the risk to firefighters entering the wilderness to fight it remained the same, according to Larkin. “This was never a good candidate fire to go direct on,” Larkin told me this week.

“One of the substantial misnomers that’s in the world is that if you just flew more air tankers, or if you just flew more helicopters, you could put this fire out,” he said. “And if we drop a lot of retardant, we drop a lot of water, it helps, but circumstance, especially in a fire this size and scope, is we could never put it out with just the aviation. You have to bring in firefighters who have to work on the ground, and you have to put them in unsafe conditions…So the bottom line is we made the choice on our strategy because that was going to be the safest and the most effective odds for success.”

Life Nearby

Living near the wilderness, in a forest where fire on the landscape is a cyclical event, requires at least a tenuous acceptance of risk.

“I’m kind of the attitude that if you go to the beach, you’re going to get sand in your underwear. If you buy a house on a golf course, you’re going to get a golf ball on your front yard. If you move to the mountains, there’s lightning and there’s fires and there’s smoke,” said Erickson, a Crescent Lake resident. “It’s just a part of being here. We knew that when we moved to the woods, when we retired, we knew that we were living near the woods, and the woods does that.”

The problem, Erickson says, is that the Forest Service has done a poor job of communicating with the public and that has eroded trust at a time when people are most vulnerable.

“These people, the people that are running government agencies, they are not really lying to them,” Erickson said. “They’re just telling them stuff in a language that these people just don’t understand. That’s what the real problem is, they just don’t know how to communicate with normal people.”

Audova, who owns and runs the bed and breakfast, Red Cone Lodge, near the lake, was also at the community meetings early on, asking when the fire would be put out and what the plan was for fighting it. “And so they did a very good job of convincing everyone that was the intent, to suppress and put it out. But what ended up happening was, as you already know, this shaded fuel break,” she said.

Locals, Audova said, periodically go past the closures and into the restricted areas to assess the fire themselves and where it burned, because they no longer trust the official reports. They are tired of not being allowed into areas that seem perfectly safe to them at this point in the fire and want at least the east side of Crescent Lake reopened. During the reporting for this story, I talked with people who had ventured into closed areas throughout the summer and provided videos and photos of what they saw in the forest.

“This is the distrust,” Audova said, staring out her dining room window toward the wilderness and smoke rising from it. “We’ve asked for transparency. We have asked for them to be fully transparent. This is our livelihood. These are our homes. We are people who live here. This is all we have.”

Audova’s lodge suffered an 80% cancelation rate for July and August because of the fire, she said. “It was devastating, beyond devastating for us financially.” It’s a financial hit that she still isn’t sure how she and her husband will rebound from – if they can at all. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us, but we have that lingering over us every single day – worrying about the financial aspect of it,” she said. “This is our dream. This is everything to us.”

To date, Larkin says, no structures have burned, and no lives have been lost to Red Fire’s flames. Current estimates are for the fire to be out by the end of November due to weather. He says that the shaded fuel break is working as planned and despite a recent increase in fire activity and the fire’s edge moving closer to the western shoreline and cabins along it, flames have not breached the break. A repudiation of local rumors that started circulating as the fire moved closer.

“It’s really scary,” Larkin said of the reality of having a fire nearby. “I can appreciate that, having that hanging over their heads all summer. But also, I’m super proud of the people that were there taking care of that fire the whole time, making sure that those folks did stay safe.”

Whether the fuel break works as planned in the long term remains to be seen. It will require frequent maintenance to ensure fast-growing vegetation doesn’t choke out the space and undo this season’s expensive and time-consuming work. Meanwhile, the Red Fire creeps on.

Editor’s note: Kim Audova’s name was misspelled as Auduva on a few references in an earlier version of this story. We have corrected the spelling throughout and regret the error. 

—This story is powered by the Lay It Out Foundation, the nonprofit with a mission of promoting deep reporting and investigative journalism in Central Oregon. Learn more and be part of this important work by visiting layitoutfoundation.org.

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