C-Hill recovers slowly from 2006 fire

Though the fire itself was contained a short time later without damage to buildings on the campus or in the town, it wasn’t long before people realized how much they valued the backdrop of the steep tree-studded hillside overlooking the picturesque CSC campus and its namesake town.

Ten years later the community has largely adjusted to viewing a C-Hill nearly devoid of the Ponderosa pines which gave the region’s Pine Ridge its name, even as a long-term effort to repopulate the slope with trees slowly begins to take hold.

“CSC had definitely capitalized on being the college among the pines for a long time, so (the fire) was a big blow to the college and greater community,” said Justin Haag, who was communications coordinator at the college in 2006.

The somber mood created by the fire-blackened hillside only began to lift when plentiful spring rains “made that hill the greenest I’ve ever seen it,” said Haag.

By then, planning for how best to help C-Hill recover from the devastating fire was already underway, according to Lucinda Mays, who in 2006 had just started working on the CSC grounds crew and is now campus horticulturalist. College officials met with state and federal forestry departments, firefighters, and anybody who might have something to contribute to recovery plans, said Mays. 

Safety was first because of the extensive recreational use on C-Hill, Mays said.

“We needed to drop the burned trees before they fell on anybody,” she said.

A contractor was engaged for that job and by late spring of 2007 had cut most of the fire-blackened pines had been cut and removed.

In the earliest effort at revegetating the burned hillside that spring, Mays scattered flower seeds on the patches of bare ground.

“The first response of (planting) something on the hill was wild flower seeds,” she said.

The public planning meetings quickly revealed the fire’s psychological impact, according to Mays.

“There was also a rather emotional response from people because it seemed like such a loss not to have a treed landscape on the hill,” she said.

Those emotions created strong local support for replanting trees on the hill, an effort that started in 2007 with a group of four Girl Scouts who obtained 200 pine seedling from the Upper-Niobrara White Natural Resources District, worked with CSC’s grounds crew to install irrigation lines, planted the trees by hand and created wire cages to protect them from foraging deer.

That was the first of many replanting efforts by local volunteer groups. By 2009, more than 550 volunteers had planted more than 12,000 trees by hand, said Mays. Another 40,000 trees and native shrubs were machine-planted in the 30-acre site, thanks to an Arbor Day Foundation grant obtained through the Nebraska Forest Service.

“It was truly a remarkable effort on the part of the community,” Mays said.

Efforts to restore the hillside’s forest weren’t favored by everyone, though. A hundred years of fire suppression policies have caused overstocking on many forested areas, such as C-Hill, and increased danger of catastrophic fires, said Dr. Chuck Butterfield, a CSC rangeland science faculty member from 1999 to 2013.

“C-Hill needed to be grazed or burned to get rid of fuel build up,” said Butterfield.

Rather than reseed the entire burn area, Butterfield suggested that a portion be left untouched as an educational tool.

“I wanted to leave some of it as a natural area and look at it ecologically; how does nature go about restarting the forest,” he said.

That idea was incorporated into the fire recovery plan, and the easternmost portion of the burned area became an active study area for several years.

“We had burned and unburned areas. Each year the classes would go out and monitor changes such as vegetation composition, re-accumulation of litter and runoff,” Butterfield said.

While most of the standing dead trees in the study area were cut down two years ago because of safety concerns, students are still visiting it to study the fire’s long term effect on plant communities, said CSC rangeland science faculty member Dr. Tony Perlinski.

The studies have confirmed the trend that Butterfield’s students documented.

“What we see after the fire is we had a pretty sizeable cool season grass invasion,” Perlinski said. “That’s a big shift from a forest system to an annual cool season grass system.”

While overstocked forests pose increased risk of fire, grass stands like those now taking over C-Hill, which include several invasive, non-native species, can also be dangerous, said Perlinski, who has obtained a permit for a controlled burn on a portion of the ridge.

“In its current state, it gives us a really good reason to bring fire back on the land,” he said. “Part of the reason we get the conflagrations we get now is have taken fire out of the system.”

The possibility replanting trees might eventually have negative consequences was on Mays’ mind as planning progressed, and played a role in deciding how many and what kind of trees to plant on the hill.

“My feeling was we were bringing back the same species that was there in the same location,” she said.

The low survival rate of trees planted in the regions arid climate, estimated at 10 percent or less, was also taken into account, said Mays. “I thought we should not end up with more than 500 trees. That was a fuel load we could handle,” she said.

As it turned out, a series of dry years after the fire killed most of the machine-planted trees and shrubs, Mays said. The irrigation lines feeding the Girl Scout-planted trees were shut down after three years, and many of them, like the other hand-planted trees, succumbed to drought and predation by deer and rabbits. 

Mays now estimates that one percent or less of the planted trees have survived.

“People are horrified by that, but to me it’s realistic,” she said. “Those are young trees competing with grasses. If they get rain, they do well. If they don’t get rain, they don’t do well.”

A careful look at the steep ravines on the hillside will also show regrowth of chokecherry bushes, and other shrubs and deciduous trees, according to Perlinski.

“Across the burn area you have slow increases in native woody species,” he said.

Meanwhile a Nebraska Forest Service project started this year aims to grow ‘seed islands’ of trees on the ridge top, with the idea that they will eventually shed cones and repopulate the lower slopes.

The landscape of C-Hill has changed in other ways since 2006. The new CSC Rangeland building now overlooks the town from a site east of the burned area and Mays has helped lay out a trail for CSC’s cross country runners that traverses the lower slope of the hill.

If Chadron sees another situation like the 2006 fire, the trail could prove useful as a fire line, said Perlinski.

Mays said she has learned several things from the 2006 fire recovery efforts, including the immense power of fire to change the landscape, the emotional response fire generates in people, and the continuous effort needed to establish trees in the dry climate of the High Plains.

But Mays has put aside any thoughts of quickly restoring C-Hill to what it looked like before 2006. “I think C-Hill will look like it did 50 years from now instead of 125 years from now. That’s the difference we made with this,” she said.