rests on nearly buried branches, and one tree sits uneasily upon another. They limb cautiously. Almost always the trunk will bind when cut, and often roll to one side; wedges, a sledge, and a second saw are essential. As Bone trudges to the thicket, Ralph prepares another set of chaps, another saw.
The trunks of the several spruce are all green. Each section, once cut, will resist movement; everything will bind. Ralph and Bone wedge each section free, then wrestle the rounds off the road with peaveys. Too slow. Ralph sets up a chocker chain around a large pine and hooks a snatch block to it, while Bone pulls out the winch cable. Section by section the logs are disassembled, dragged in whining protest over the drainage ditch and across the berm. Ralph and Bone strip every branch from one final round and roll it down the road. The road bends, but the round continues and neatly caroms off into the woods. Finally they kick the littering branches off the road. Still in chaps, they eat lunch under another fir. The next logs down the road are aspen, easy stuff. “Bare hands,” Bone yawns.
The road gradually descends to the Rim, and after another mile or so they will leave the trashy spruce-fir and enter the more open ponderosa forest. Here logs seem to fall perpendicular to the road; the trunks are round, clean of branches through self-pruning; windfall is less extensive; it is easy business to buck, roll, or winch. If the top of a ponderosa crashes across a road, it can throttle passage with large, cumbersome branches, but with pine only a few judicious cuts, a selective carving, are needed—not a shearing as with spruce and fir. Yet more is at stake than ease of sawing; large expanses of ponderosa coincide with the Rim, and the Rim with fire.
The Plateau and the Canyon are dichotomous. They meet with catastrophic suddenness along the Rim, a border that is profoundly irrational and immensely powerful. The Plateau is a great inverted dish, shallow and carved into ridges and ravines that radiate outward from a central axis like spokes in an oblong wheel. The hydrologic connection between Plateau and Canyon is subterranean; the Plateau absorbs moisture like a sponge, then discharges it at spectacular springs deep in the Canyon. The surface drainage of the Plateau is a relic of Pleistocene fluvialism, while the sidegorges of the Canyon expand along ancient, long-dormant faults laid down during the flexing of the Plateau. In some areas surface ravines drain away from the Canyon, in others, parallel to it; where a ravine does debouch into the Canyon, its contribution is negligible. The topography of the Plateau does not lead logically to the Canyon Rim; the fireroads do.
Fires are not limited to the Rim, but they have a peculiar relationship with it, as though snags were somehow ignited by the friction of Canyon against Plateau. To get from point to point along the Rim, however, you must pass back into the Plateau. That means that the fireroads want to go other than where the Plateau wants them to, and it means that the opening of the fireroads is slightly out of sync with the natural cycle of the fire season. The points dry first, and fires appear there earliest in the season; but to reach them, you have to pass into the Plateau, where the snowmelt is incomplete and the roads impassable. The incongruity of the fireroads is the incongruity of fire, Park, and Rim.
Superimposed on the annual cycle of road opening is a larger history by which the roads were installed, maintained, and abandoned. Clearing the fireroads opens questions of Park policy. Even as we labor to clear the system, there is a movement to shut them permanently. The fireroad grid was largely laid out during the CCC occupation of the Rim, and as a network it reached its apogee during the early 1960s. When fire policy is reformulated, the fireroads feel the impact quickly. Some of the roads are abandoned because they cannot be restored without extensive maintenance. All the roads that pass through meadows are closed for ecological reasons with the exception of those that, like Sublime and W-1 to The Basin, also carry tourists. The euphoria of closure is contagious. E-1, E-2, E-3, E-1A, E-6A, E-6B, E-7, W-2, W-1G, W-1C, W-1B, W-1D-A, W-1D-B, W-5, W-4A, W-4C, W-3, W-1E—the fireroad system of the North Rim is soon gutted.
We keep some old roads on our fire maps as trails and otherwise increase our reliance on helicopters, though the Park refuses to allow permanent helispots to be constructed and steadily downgrades our priority access to the Park helo. The old fireroad names become disjunctive, remembered by veterans and learned by rookies but without integration or purpose. As the roads close, we nail the old road signs to the fire cache wall and replace their alphanumeric nomenclature with geographic names. W-4B becomes the Swamp Point road; W-1D, E-6, and E-5 become, respectively, the Tiyo Point road, the Obi and Ariel Point roads, the Matthes Point road. But the old names persist, like fire-sculptured snags in green woods.
The operating principle seems to be that fireroads which are visible to the public but not opened for public travel are condemned, while those with public access, regardless of the terrain through which they pass, are retained. The Park will not deny public access in the face of public criticism, and it will not deny access to the heaviest user of all: itself. To close down all roads would shut off the backcountry not only to visitors and to the fire crew but to rangers, interpreters, and researchers. In fact, as the ranger division swells beyond the carrying capacity of the Rim, it is essential that some fireroads remain open so that excess rangers can undertake “backcountry road patrol.” Thus for major fireroads the Park refuses to let them be either repaired or closed: it wants the roads without appearing to have the roads. Closing fireroads is a way to convey a new fire policy without having to support that policy overtly. It is not fire that the Park wants to manage but its fire establishment. Shutting down fireroads is a way to shut down activities that no longer seem relevant to the agency. The only road that truly concerns the Park is the entrance road, which it insists must be widened and rebuilt to accommodate the motor homes that swarm like tent caterpillars. The future reconstruction of the entrance road will keep the Park in a happy uproar for several seasons.
Bone mentally notes the indirect effects of the approaching Rim—the more open canopy, the gusts of warm wind, the drier forest. If Rich and Lenny move down from the Swamp Point road, they should meet Ralph and Bone by midafternoon. With two vehicles in tandem, they should be able to clear the Kanabownits tower road. There might even be time, on the way back to the cache, for a detour to Tipover.
* * *
Both fires are probably started by the same storm cell. The fire at Matthes Point is instantly reported by Scenic Airlines; the Rookie fire is a sleeper.
Jack and I race to Matthes in the red powerwagon. Unlike other Walhalla fireroads E-5 is rarely boggy. We pass rapidly through ponderosa forests interspersed with glades of rock and grass. The fire is at the end of the road, a snag exactly on the Rim, not ten yards from the road.
Jack drops the tree carefully inland, against the lean but away from the Canyon, a maneuver that exhausts our stock of wooden wedges. The active fire flickers in the lightning-gouged furrow around the trunk. Clouds darken the sky, and in the distance there is thunder. We limb and buck the snag, then prepare to start the slip-on. Easy money. As the slip-on coughs to life, however, the first raindrops strike. There are more and soon a deluge. We kill the slip-on and scramble into the cab of the truck. The rain lets up slightly, only to continue in a steady drizzle. We draw cards. I lose and dash out of the truck to turn over the bucked sections of snag. They sizzle in the rain. Before I reenter the cab, I grab my firepack. It contains enough rations for both of us.
Then it is Jack’s turn, so he finishes his crackers and runs to turn over the logs. The rain falls steadily. For another two hours we dash to the fire in a weird minuet. Each run fogs up the cab, and we have to turn on the defroster. We stand a couple of logs upright, vertically, and let the rain drain into their rotten cores. We finish our rations, read, and talk; at about 1600 hours the rain lets up. We climb out of the cab and inspect the fire. The air outside is cold and damp; the Canyon is a rocking sea of clouds. The slip-on has a full tank. Jack wants to know whether or not we can claim that we worked during our lunch hour.
The Rookie fire is not reported for another three days. It probably survived the rains by retreating into a catface, a cavity at the base of a pine. The fire is two acres in size, spreading steadily but unspectacularly in all
