Recover they do though. When I started with CDF in 1978 there were two fires that had burned 20,000 and 90,000 acres respectively in the area I worked. Now you have to look very hard to see any evidence of those fires.
Controlled burns are good but very hard to pull off. We had many cancelled because conditions weren't right, crews weren't available, wind was too high or the wrong direction, humidity was too high or to low etc. One of my early fires was controlled burn by the USFS that got away and burned private property near fall river mills. For years it wasn't safe for usfs employees to shop in town. Not to mention the complaints the smoke generates when burns are done.
We've let so many people move in close proximity to the forest its near impossible to return the forest to anything resembling natural conditions anymore.
Do you recall the Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico in 2000? That started as a control burn. It burned more than 200 houses in Los Alamos. That put the FS district on the hot seat. Even so, control burns happen all the time here and most (not all) go off without a hitch.
During the last decade or so, little pieces of the NF were sold off as part of the Secure Rural Schools Act. Most of those little pieces are in the forest interior, and the NF boundaries are a messy patchwork. The forest-urban interface is very convoluted. Is it like that in the California forests as well? Fortunately, congress failed to authorize the last sale of NF land. However, since I choose to live in that interface myself, I can't point fingers too much.
If the forests had not been altered so much by the last century's logging and fire suppression practices, the interface would be easier to protect. That's a fact. The risk of catastrophic fire is something we now have to accept here. But, it's the same for the folks in Texas, who are being threatened by huge fast moving grassland fires. It's the same for the towns along the flooding Mississippi. It's not just the forests. It's that there are so many people living everywhere that any disaster affects more people.
I was in the Dusty, NM area yesterday, up near Mt. Worthington and I could see smoke from the Gila from there.
