burn season has begun. hell fuckin yea
typically in my area our fall burn season is pretty short. we don't start burning until after the second hard frost has driven most of the critters into hiding, and from that point on we're rolling the weather dice against time in hopes we get some good days with the right temps, relative humidities, wind speeds/directions/mixing heights, etc etc etc before the snow comes to fuck everything up.
there's like a million reasons we do prescribed burns. burning up all the dead plant matter on the ground in a controlled manner makes it less likely for it to start a wildfire; it lets light penetrate to the soil to improve spring germination (that was the main goal of today's burn); it suppresses invasive species. and it's super cool and fun to do.
the area where i live used to burn regularly for thousands of years, both from wildfires and from indigenous peoples' cultural fires. before colonization people would set fires for some of the same reasons we do today - like to mitigate wildfire risk - but also to open up line-of-sight in hunting areas, to cultivate plants in foraging zones, among others. these fires were so ecologically prominent that native flora and fauna are adapted to survive and in some cases even depend on fire. after europeans turned most of this place into farmland, they suppressed fire for a hundred, hundred fifty years. it wasn't until relatively recently that fire reemerged as a land management practice. it's very cool to take part in something so heavily reliant on and informed by indigenous science.
here's how you do a prescribed burn: you pick a unit (we never burn an entire site at once. it's important to leave unburned patches for insects to overwinter in, so we burn in units that we cycle through each year), surround it with fire breaks (mowed vegetation, hardscapes, water features, etc.), and alert the local authorities. then, on the opposite side of the unit from the wind, you start lighting backfires in either direction around the unit. when you lay down a line of fire with a drip torch (a very cool jug full of diesel and gas) it starts a "backfire" and a "headfire." the backfire moves slowly because it's against the wind, and the headfire moves quickly with the wind. put the headfire out for now. once the backfires have bordered the unit in burnt material that won't relight, start a headfire that will rip through the unit, carried by the wind. it's never this simple in practice but that's basically the gist of it. oh also don't try this at home because that's arson.
today's burn was only 32 acres (still a lot!) but the last burn i did was close to 300. that was a lot of walking. today was a lot of walking too - our weather conditions were marginal to begin with and took a turn for the annoying once we got out there. the mixing height was really low so our smoke just hung around, which made for cool photos but meant that we had to burn super slow so we weren't obscuring the roadway or bothering the neighbors.
also the fuel (dead leaves) was much drier and much more plentiful than anticipated. so it wanted to burn fast and hot. which would have been good for our purposes except that there was a lot of deadfall in the area so after we finished a slower-than-expected burn we had to spend hours "mopping up" all the burning logs and standing dead trees, which was a huge pain in the ass. we started the day expecting a 3pm end and did not finish until 6. oof
but you know what that is? that's 12 hours of overtime for me babyyyyyyyyyyyyy 💸💸💸💸💸
