In-Season Burning above Nevada City – The Lookout

I filmed on a burn on Harmony Ridge, above Nevada City yesterday with a newish private company called ‘[First Rain Land Stewardship](https://www.firstrainlandstewardship.com/)’. They run a thinning crew out of Nevada City and the owner is a CARX California State-Certified Burn Boss. I wanted to cover this burn because with all of the media attention on Cal Fire’s Putah Creek escaped burn last week, and after months of doomer ‘*2026 will be the worst fire season ever*’ reporting, it seems like many people are really anxious about the upcoming season, but that we aren’t really there, yet. Also, I feel like we need to push into burning WHENEVER THE CONDITIONS ARE APPROPRIATE, regardless of calendar dates.

We broadcast burned about 13 acres of mixed conifer that had been thinned last summer by First Rain. They had burned some of the piles last winter, but about 2/3 of the unit still had piles in it. Some of the piles were pretty large, but all of them burned down to the heavies within 10-15 minutes. The woods on the other sides of the property lines were scary-thick with heavy cedar reprod and needlecast manzanita (see photo 2, below)!

We had about 15 people which included the First Rain crew, 4 people from the new Nevada City Fuels Crew (paid out of a local bond measure), one person from the Nevada County RCD, and a couple guys from North San Juan VFD (?). Many of the people on the burn had previous firefighting and logging experience.

It got up into the 90s after lunch, but RHs stayed above 30% and we remained in prescription. There was not much wind or lift, so we got shaded a bit by our own smoke for most of the day. We had roads around about 1/2 of the burn, and a hoselay around the rest. We had 4 or 5 Type VI engines and a couple water trailers. All of the un-roaded lines were well burned-in by the time it heated up in the afternoon.

The duff was dry all the way down to mineral soil, but there was quite a bit of greenery in the forbs and grasses. The terrain was complex, due to lots of old mining disturbance, so they backed fire off all the little ridges between the old gullies, and got really good consumption on the duff and litter. There were a lot of piles in the gullies, and the heat from these may have killed some of the residual trees in the tighter gullies. It was freaking hot in there, and the heat lasted for a long time. It was a reminder that in our heaviest thickets, in places we can’t operate mechanically, removing fuels is really difficult – with the volume of overstocking we are facing in many places, pile burning can result in high mortality, even if you burn in the winter.

One benefit of having all the heat from the piles was that we got good indrafts to the center of the units, and there wasn’t much smoke for the holding crews.

Yesterday was the first day of the burn permit suspension in NEU. This project was done under a land management exemption, signed by the Unit Duty Officer.