It has been building steadily since about pm, in an area with very little fire history, poor access, and heavy fuels. Hirz Fire burned to the west in blue. The red fires on this map are from the s and 30s. The area where the Shoe Fire is burning is remote, with very few structures, and a lot of wild landscape covered with oaks, brush, and some timber. Very little logging has happened on the public lands here in the past 30 years. This wildland is great wildlife habitat, and fire is one of the best tools we would have to manage this landscape.
This makes using fire for land management basically impossible, as the private timberlands are largely covered with a mix of dense second-growth timber and young plantations in the areas which have been clearcut in the past 30 years. The private lands generally are not fire-resilient, and the timber companies exert a great amount of pressure on the state and federal agencies to keep all fires in the area as small as possible.
Railroad companies were given every other square mile of land within the first six miles of their rail line as a subsidy and to encourage them to build out the rail network of the West, but sometimes, they were given much more land. In Shasta County, the checkerboard areas extend up to 20 miles on either side of I-5 in some places. The red lands in the map below are privately owned, and the checkerboarded areas are evident.
Over time, the railroads sold these lands to private industrial forestry companies. This ownership pattern ends up standing out pretty starkly when you look at the aerials of what the Bagley Fire area looks like on private vs. Many of the 10 year-old plantations on private timberlands in the Bagley Fire area may have significant loadings of pre-commercial thinning slash, as the plantations are often thinned in the first years after planting.
One view from a webcam in the Bagley Fire shows quite a bit of slash in the young stands. For more context on how checkerboard land ownership relates to fire management, check out this presentation I made to the NorCal Botany Symposium on this topic in Powerpoint on how land ownership patterns affect options for landscape-scale fire management. There is a lot of black oak in this area, and the conifer forest is not very continuous.
