TUCSON — On a cool November day in the mid-1990s, Jenni Zimmerman was driving her grandfather up Catalina Highway for Thanksgiving dinner at the cabin in Summerhaven where she grew up. As she steered the car up Mount Lemmon, her grandfather pointed his arthritic finger out the window, toward the dense Coronado National Forest.
“All these dead trees,” Jenni recalls him saying. “There’s going to be a fire.”
“Don’t say that,” she replied.
“It’s gonna happen,” he said.
And he was right.
The new millennium ushered in unprecedented wildfires across the West, and Mount Lemmon wasn’t spared.
The community Jenni’s grandfather helped build, the sawmill he once owned and the cabin his grandchildren grew up in all burned in the Aspen Fire of 2003.
Her grandfather had died by then, leaving his son to walk the wreckage of more than 300 structures. A fox limped along near the entrance of town, its fur singed.
For many homeowners in Summerhaven, the Aspen Fire was a wake up call to improve forest health. But while wildfires in Arizona and across the West have grown steadily larger and more devastating, Summerhaven homeowners and others across Arizona's high country have struggled to work within evolving forest management policies.
Plans to thin overgrown forests and reduce wildfire risk on a large scale across the state have limped along amid questions about how to pay for the work. In the meantime, more than 1.5 million acres of ponderosa pine forest have burned over the past 20 years. Climate change and a relentless drought make more fires inevitable.
Few doubt that thinning overgrown forests will improve their chances for survival. In places where it's done right, wildfires behave as they did a century ago, clearing the forest of debris and undergrowth.
So some communities have decided to focus their efforts more strategically, targeting the places of most value, saving the important parts of the forest, even if some others are lost. It means sometimes changing the definition of living in a forest.
In Summerhaven, an oasis of pine forests in the peaks above Tucson, forest managers and homeowners have begun to adopt that strategy, thinning dense stands of trees on the landscape, trying to preserve what they can and safeguard the village while there's still time.
Wildfires like the Aspen are, in part, a legacy of the U.S. Forest Service's old wildfire suppression policy, which left forests like the Coronado dense with trees and brush.
In the 1930s, the service adopted a policy to extinguish fires by 10 a.m. the following day, removing fire from its role in keeping forests clear of overgrowth and debris. Without fire, the forests grew dense and overcrowded, accumulating more and more fuel for wildfire.
Drought raised the risk. The year 2002 was one of the driest in Arizona in more than 500 years.
Wildfires grew by an order of magnitude across the West in a short amount of time. Now researchers say the fire season will continue to grow longer and more intense as climate change and drought worsens.
“If you look at the change in the size of large fires from the 1990s to the 2000s, the fire size goes up by a factor of ten in a space of about five years, from 50,000 acres to 500,000-acre fires,” said Donald Falk, a fire ecologist at the University of Arizona. “Well, that was not fuel accumulation. That fuel had been accumulating steadily for decades.”
Drought kick-started these unprecedented fires, he said. And we are still experiencing it.
On Mount Lemmon, a smoker on the Aspen Trail started the Aspen Fire, the largest fire the mountain had ever seen.
Many on the mountain have confronted visitors smoking in Summerhaven, but a wildfire's initial spark is only half their worry.
The forest's fuel is the other half. And they are frustrated by how it's managed.
Many don’t blame the Forest Service, but Washington D.C.
“They have no understanding of the forest cycle,” said Bill Piatkiewicz, a retiree who lives there full time.
Forest managers thin trees, ignite prescribed burns and use wildfire to reduce fuel, but it doesn’t come close to reaching the number of acres that fire historically managed on its own.
Fire ecology research shows that around 60 percent of Forest Service land across Arizona and New Mexico is located where frequent fires occur naturally, said Pamela Bostwick, a fuels program manager for the agency’s Southwest region.
“That’s a lot. That’s a lot of acres.”
Around 1 million acres a year should be getting fire, she said.
In 2017, only 300,665 acres of natural wildfire and prescribed burns reached Forest Service land in Arizona and New Mexico, according to an analysis by The Arizona Republic of valid fuel reduction treatments, which the Forest Service reports to Congress every fiscal year in the Forest Service Activity Tracking System database.
Fires ignited by humans or wildfires that fail to meet management goals do not count as valid fuel reduction treatments.
While climate is changing the fire season and humans are suppressing it, people can do something about fuels in the short run, Falk said. But methods to reduce fuels have limits.
“The pace of thinning has not been sufficient to keep up with the problem and the agencies know it,” Falk said. “They’ve really been trying to break out of that.”
Before the Aspen Fire, areas of the Coronado forest grew “overstocked” with trees if left untreated, said Heidi Schewel, a spokeswoman for the Coronado National Forest. “It’s this sequential process. You can’t do everything at once. If we could wave a magic wand and say, ‘It’s all thinned,’ then that would have been done long ago.”
From 2003 to 2017, the Coronado forest reported 6,763 acres of completed thinning projects, less than a tenth the size of the Aspen Fire, according to the agency's activity database.
The Coronado's Environmental Impact Statement proposes to treat nearly 500,000 acres of the Coronado with methods including thinning and fire reintroduction over a 10-year period.
That is nearly 150,000 acres more than all the valid fuel reduction treatments that the Coronado has tracked in their database from 2008 to 2017. The forest reported over 330,000 acres, which includes activities like stacking cut and fallen trees and removing natural debris.
Less than 2 percent of those acres were completed thinning projects, coming in at around 4950 acres. Roughly 36 percent were prescribed burns and 18 percent were natural wildfire, over 182,100 acres.
While prescribed burns and natural wildfires have treated more acres in the Coronado than thinning, climate change may shake things up.
“Changes in the temperatures could shift our windows of opportunities (for prescribed burns),” Schewel said.
With less snow, forest managers are adapting to warmer and drier conditions by setting controlled burns earlier in the winter, according to Molly Hunter, a research scientist at the University of Arizona. A decent monsoon season could still create opportunities in the summer.
As an added obstacle, fighting fires has grown more costly, forcing the Forest Service to “borrow” funds from these types of forest management efforts.
In May 2002, a year before the Aspen Fire, Michael Stanley was at the Loma Linda picnic area helping firefighters get access to water to suppress the Bullock Fire. He worked for the water utility.
A 200-foot wall of embers seemed to come straight for them, Stanley said. He wrote about it in a poem.
“For here I was in the depths of the flames,
Knowing this fire could take all that remains.
Take our life, as we know it, all so gay
Burn it, turn it to ashes and throw it away.”
He was sure that the Bullock Fire would take out Summerhaven, but it didn’t happen.
“It was like an angel flapped their wings,” he said. “And the angel just flapped its wings and (the fire) went all the way back down and it stayed totally away from us after that.”
The fire ultimately burned over 30,000 acres, which was big for the Coronado forest at the time.
In his poem, he lamented the erosion and habitat loss cause by the fire.
The Bullock Fire taught him a lesson, he said.
“It’s easier to burn down a whole forest than to Firewise an acre because all of those hoops you have to bounce through,” he said, referring to the name of a program meant to help homeowners protect land and property from fire.
Many homeowners on Mount Lemmon share Stanley’s frustration with the fuel treatment process in national forests. They want the Forest Service to thin more acres at a faster pace.
Under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Forest Service must study how anything they do affects the environment, from building a picnic table to thinning acres of overly dense forest.
In March, the Coronado forest finished an environmental analysis of about 260,000 acres in the Santa Catalina and Rincon mountains. The project, known as Firescape, clears the way for fuel treatment projects across one large area of the forest, replacing reviews one at a time for smaller fuel treatment projects.
Homeowners are still frustrated that it took so long to complete. They’ve been waiting 14 years for this, said Sally Crum, the chairwoman for the Firewise group on Mount Lemmon.
Many wanted Arizona lawmakers to add Mount Lemmon to a pilot project approved by the U.S. House in an amendment to the Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017. The bill would bypass environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act for certain thinning projects, among others.
There are other factors at work.
“People love to blame NEPA,” Falk said. But it’s overshadowed by the need to thin trees and biomass that private industry generally doesn’t want.
Meanwhile, living in the middle of a fire-prone forest presents its own problems
Wildfires have grown so much larger, Falk said, partly because we’re suppressing fire to protect homes built in fire-prone areas.
“The public agencies and fire managers, they know what to do. They have the tools and the science and the experience to manage fire. The problem is that most of the time they can’t do what they want to do.”
During the Bullock Fire, Leanne Mack sat on the porch of an apartment in Tucson, sipping soda with her parents as they watched Mount Lemmon burn. Her family owns the general store in Summerhaven, where she worked.
The Macks had everything on the line, their business and their home.
“You don’t know what you’re going home to, if you are going home,” she said.
They had a few days’ notice to pack up their belongings and evacuate to Tucson.
Leanne’s mom, Carol Mack, didn't know what to do.
“Being that helpless is a position I don’t do well with,” Carol said.
After fire crews suppressed the Bullock Fire, Carol went back home with a false sense of security.
“So in my — I’m gonna call it today — stupidity, (I) had the false confidence that, well, if firefighters saved the mountain the year before surely we can save the mountain this year too," Carol said. "So we didn’t bother packing anything.”
Then in June 2003 she smelled smoke and saw ash fall from the sky. She heard what sounded like a freight train or a jet. It was the Aspen fire.
The fire alarm rang throughout Summerhaven. “It was the eeriest feeling to hear that knowing what the potential could be,” she said.
“My brain is like, ‘How could this have happened a second time?’”
To Falk, it was almost as if Bullock fire hadn’t stopped. To him, the way these fires burned were indistinguishable.
“It could have been the Aspen Fire,” he said.
“The whole mountain range was in this condition, overstocked with fuel and droughty and ready to burn,” he said.
He and other researchers started treating the two fires as one event.
On June 19, Schewel, the spokeswoman for the Coronado National Forest, had taken reporters up Mount Lemmon to report on the Aspen Fire. While she was there she saw the wind shift toward Summerhaven. It took the fire into the village.
She saw firefighters stand on Inspiration Rock, a popular vista on the mountain, looking down on the village where they had just fled. She could hear gas tanks vent or explode along with other sounds she couldn’t place coming from Summerhaven.
As Carol Mack fled the mountain she kept her fire department radio on. She had become a volunteer firefighter and wildland EMT after the Bullock Fire when she vowed to protect her town from the next fire.
She pulled her vehicle over in Tucson to keep listening just before she lost signal. She heard over the radio that the fire and battalion chiefs were entering Summerhaven again. The initial fire storm had passed. She listened to them as they assessed the town.
"Mount Lemmon Realty. Spared," she heard one of them say.
"Mount Lemmon Café. Spared."
"Summerhaven Coffee house. Gone."
She fought back tears as she recounted listening to her radio.
"Mt. Lemmon General Store and Gift shop. Gone."
All she could do was cry. Her home was gone. Her livelihood, gone.
She was too shaken to keep driving, so she called her husband. He came and sat with her until she collected herself.
When she arrived at the hotel she avoided everyone else who had evacuated Summerhaven. She didn’t want to be the one to tell the others that the town was gone. So she went to her room, ordered room service and got drunk.
Outside by the pool, Leanne watched ashes fall from the Tucson sky.
The next day, Carol called the fire chief.
“I have to come up,” she told him.
The chief initially didn’t think it was a good idea, but she begged. She insisted.
“You know I’m a hard worker. You know I can help.”
When she arrived at Summerhaven, she felt disoriented. Many of the town’s landmarks had burned down. The spiral staircase that once connected her house to her store had melted over.
The fire burned for about a month. Every day she drove up the mountain. Every night she returned to Tucson to be with her husband. He worried about her and had asked her to return in the evenings.
Not everyone’s homes had burned down, but it still wasn’t safe for them to return. After a while, the meat in their refrigerators turned rancid. The stench was horrid. That was one of Carol's jobs. She went house by house, cleaning up rotted meat.
“It was a wake-up call,” she said. The town started thinking more about forest health.
Before the Aspen Fire, residents liked the dense growth, she said. They used it as privacy walls between the small lots in the village.
As she cleaned up her village, she thought, “How could we have been so complacent in thinking that what we lived in was good and healthy?”
Even so, some homeowners who didn’t lose their homes still wanted to keep the dense vegetation, Carol said.
“I lost friendships over it.”
In August 2003, after the Aspen Fire was put out, President George W. Bush visited Inspiration Rock.
As he talked about his Healthy Forest Initiative, Carol felt it was a positive step in the direction of ending an era of indiscriminately suppressing wildfire.
But there was still a long way to go, she said.
In 2003, Bush signed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which bolstered his initiative and aimed to reduce wildfire fuel near communities most at risk of catastrophic wildfires.
But progress was slow. A 2016 audit found the Forest Service lacked a scientifically based process to assess risk and select fuel treatment projects.
It also reiterated findings of a 2006 audit of the agency’s implementation of the Healthy Forest Initiative.
The Forest Service was over-reporting to Congress the acres the agency treated for fuel reduction by double-counting procedures for the same projects on the same acres, like cutting, piling and burning .
The Forest Service’s 2019 budget justification said, “the agency concurred with the recommendations (from the audit) and all corrective actions have been fully implemented."
The Southwest regional Forest Service office sent The Republic a list of fuel reduction treatments that the agency reports to congress in the Forest Activity Tracking System database.
The list includes treatments, like piling and burning, that could count the same acres in the same project more than once.
But the database also reports these projects spatially to show the actual area of treatments, noted Bostwick, the Fuels Program Manager for the Forest Service.
A press release from President Bush's visit to Mount Lemmon touted an increase in funding for thinning.
While an uptick in acres of completed thinning projects followed on the Coronado, the number of acres didn’t increase steadily, according to the activity tracking database. And they peaked in fiscal year 2008.
Across Arizona, the number of thinned acres rose fairly steadily from 2003 through 2007, peaking at nearly quadruple the acres thinned in 2000. But 10 years later, in 2017, the number of acres had dropped by more than 10,000 acres.
In 2017, the national forests in Arizona recorded over 260,000 acres of completed fuel reduction treatments in the tracking system. About 12 percent of those acres were completed thinning projects. Nearly 25 percent were controlled burns and less than half were beneficial natural wildfires.
The Coronado forest has wanted to increase fuel treatments for years, Falk said, but they have been stymied by a lack of regional and national funding. And much of the funding for forest management goes to fight wildfires.
In March, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue applauded the passage of the omnibus spending bill for addressing “fire borrowing.” It's when fire suppression gets so expensive that it takes from the forest management budget, which could otherwise bolster thinning fuel reduction efforts. The new budget outlines steps to prevent redirecting fuel reduction funds to suppress wildfire.
Not all environmental groups were happy with the solution because it bypasses environmental review for certain fuel reduction projects up to 3,000 acres.
For example, it chipped away at NEPA protections for logging projects under the guise of fuel reduction projects, the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.
While the bill doesn’t completely solve the problem, Falk said, Congress has taken a step in the right direction.
On a windy morning, Peter Norton and Aaron Lindflott, two off-duty firemen, pulled a trailer behind their truck to a home in Summerhaven near the fire department. They have a side business clearing out wildfire fuel from from homeowners' yards on the mountain. They hauled out dry logs, brittle and ashy, scattered in their yard, which sits in the scar of the Aspen Fire on a steep slope overlooking the mountains.
Norton lifted a log over his shoulder. Ants fell on his back and neck. As Lindflott moved pile after pile of wood, he smeared ash in his teeth, on his face and on his shirt. They hauled out layers of dry wood in a rubber trash barrel. There was more than they realized.
While homeowners in Summerhaven are frustrated by the pace of wildfire fuel reduction in the surrounding national forest, a group of them is encouraging the community to reduce hazardous fuel on private property to defend the village from the next wildfire.
They are a Firewise committee, one in a network of over 1,500 others across the nation that encourages communities to protect themselves and adapt to life with wildfires.
They organized a training class in April, taught by state foresters, to teach homeowners how to asses fire risks on private property.
The Firewise committee members go to public libraries and community centers with a blunt message, printed on their flyers:
“It’s not if, but WHEN.”
It makes some feel uncomfortable. One community member at a meeting told the group that some people in the village were tiring of hearing it.
But regardless, the message is true, Crum and the Summerhaven fire chief responded.
With each day the village worries over visitors smoking cigarettes or starting campfires amid federal fire restrictions in the Coronado forest.
“Oh it’s so dry, it’s crazy,” Jenni Zimmerman said. Everyone on the mountain is nervous until the monsoon comes, she said. That’s usually how it is in June.
And one rainstorm may not be enough. In late June, federal fire restrictions remained in effect in the Coronado, even after it rained there. It's still too dry.
A warmer and dryer climate lengthens and intensifies the fire season.
“We go in and out of droughts. Sure," the UA's Falk said. "That definitely happens, but that’s not what’s happening here. This is absolutely a switch ... driven by climate change."
And as climate grows warmer and drier, it may affect what grows back after a fire. Trees have a harder time recovering under those conditions after they die, Falk said. While adult trees can weather a hot summer without rain, seedlings don’t have the resources to survive.
Two patches of regrowth in the wake of the Aspen Fire on the Marshal Gultch trail near Summerhaven come to mind for Christopher Guiterman, a researcher at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree Ring Research. One is regrowing in a “natural system” and the other is not.
In one area, thick shrubs grew in the Aspen Fire’s scar beneath standing fire-killed trees. In another area nearby, the fire burned the trees, but it didn’t kill them, leaving a canopy of ponderosa pines.
Under the canopy, a carpet of young pines is regenerating. This is their “natural adaptation,” Guiterman said. If it continues, surface fire would create another regrowth cycle, eventually layering ponderosa pine canopies of varying ages.
Thick shrubs, on the other hand, crowd out ponderosa pine seeds, soaking up the available sunlight and moisture, he said.
Across Arizona's high country, conservationists are also worried about what might happen if a devastating fire strikes before the Four Forest Restoration Initiative can thin and restore the thousands of acres within its boundaries.
Some of these forests won’t grow back under these conditions, said Patrick Graham, The Nature Conservancy's state director in Arizona.
And climate change is one reason Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz. wants thinning projects to move at a faster clip, too.
“The changing climate has had a big impact,” he said at a press conference last October. “It gives urgency to what’s going on right now.”
Meanwhile on Mount Lemmon, Carol Mack has an even more pressing concern: safety.
She's determined to improve the forest's heath to protect the people in her community from another unprecedented wildfire.
They are her family, she said. She’s willing to do whatever it takes.
“Family takes care of family no matter what.”
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Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. Follow the azcentral and Arizona Republic environmental reporting team at OurGrandAZ on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.