Thanks. I'm researching a fire history of the Kaibab Plateau - the Dragon Bravo fire is too big a provocation for someone who spent so many fire seasons there, but I want the whole plateau and the long history of fire not just DB. Looks like I'll be slogging thru FOIAs though.

Can you identify the fire? Is the photo yours?

Good article, but I did get misquoted. A century ago many timberowners argued for lightburning to protect big trees, while USFS wanted fire suppression to protect young trees as the forest of the future. Now we want to thin out small trees and protect big ones. Interpretations have inverted.

Yep. The power of fire resides in the power to propagate. Arson more resembles a riot than a drive-by shooting - it spreads by contagion. You disarm arson by denying it the power to spread in ways that damage communities and kill people.

Was kind of a fun interview, tho had to drive 90 minutes to find the coniferous forest background the show wanted. Unfortunately, it looks like the video is blocked in US, so I can't speak to how it all came out.

Easy to praise a seminal paper. Glad they let a guy who is neither a dendrochronologist nor an archaelogist have a crack at it.

(l) Ed Pulaski a few weeks after the Blowup.
(r) Many years later, dispatching a fire guard equipped with his eponymous tool.

(l) Ed Pulaski a few weeks after the fire.
(r) Years later sending out a fire guard equipped with his eponymous tool.

In 1968 lightning started a fire on the Dragon's Head. The park let it burn. The FS said if the park didn't suppress the fire, it would. A B17 dropped retardant. Now a fire is allowed to spread from the Rim to the Dragon. How the meaning of full suppression has changed.This fire remains a cypher.

Our management metrics can't cope with this kind of shape-shifting complexity. The Kaibab Plateau is becoming a cypher.

It looks like it will link with the burn footprint of the 2006 Warm fire (an escaped WFU; blue arrow). If so it will be bracketed on the north by an escaped WFU and on the south by an escaped Rx fire (the 2000 Outlet fire). If it reaches the White Sage fire, by the entire plateau.

Quite a contrast with the managed fires on the Gila NF. But then the Gila was one of the very few places to embrace the policy reforms of 1978 and begin restoring fire. We're seeing resilience from 40 years of sustained effort

There is a lot I'd like to say but I need more facts than I have now. History is about context and contingency. Writing is about voice and vision. As we learn more about the, I'll be able to wrangle the pieces together. Still, having the Grand Canyon as your fireline is a bit gobsmacking.

The only thing that will stop this fire is a massive change in weather (rain, wind) or the Canyon - above Saddle Mtn, Marble; below, Grand. Other than the Kaibab Lodge complex, there is not much worth keeping up a fight, however "full" you want to call the suppression.