Thursday, March 15 promised to be another warm day, but it started out very foggy, and all the fuel was dripping wet. However, by lunch time things had dried out and conditions were good for a savanna/woodland burn. We had our regular crew enhanced by Jim Hess. All were experienced and in fact had burned this same unit the past three years.
Unit 19 is an accident of geography, since it is separated by our gravel service road from the rest of the ridge-top savanna. It mostly slopes downhill toward the north. We have a good fire break north of Unit 19 and just uphill from the large north woods which drops steeply down toward the county highway. Thus, Unit 19 is a long, narrow unit, about 5 acres. There are quite a few birches, which had been cleared around since we wanted to save them, but we still had quite a few potential "torches". The pumper unit in our Kawasaki Mule got a great workout.
There was a light wind out of the west and north, not enough to prevent us from burning, but enough to contribute to the head fire resulting from the slope. Thus, we we had to burn slowly. One drip torch backburned down from the gravel road toward the north and once a good strip had been blackened the second drip torch lighted uphill and upwind. The photo below shows the start of the burn, which is in the wider area called 19E. The gravel road that we backburned down from is shown, and the north fire break is in the back, about 25 feet from the flaming front. The second photo shows this same area from above after the fire had passed through. This is a nice area of predominantly white oaks.


The backburn along the gravel road went well, except for the birches, but the burn uphill from the N fire break led to flame heights that caused quite a few problems. We put out most of the flaming birches, and one or two tall snags.
The photo below shows the line crew moving along the north fire break. We tried to keep the flame heights as low as shown here. In addition to backpack water, we kept the pumper unit mostly on this fire break. (The Kawasaki is great because it can go anywhere in this kind of terrain!)


We took care of most of our problems as we burned, so there was not much mop-up.

Just as we finished the burn Paul Zedler's class in fire ecology (UW-Madison) turned up. Good timing!

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