Report of Supervisors' Meeting. 437 



possible to burn piles which were within a few feet of good seed 

 trees without any injury to the trees except a httle scorching of 

 the lower branches. The action of the heat melts the snow, the 

 water runs off, and the tree is not scorched. When your large 

 piles get going you can not get close enough to the trees to throw 

 enough snow to hold it back, whereas, on a small fire a few 

 shovelfuls of snow will do the work. Where such burning is 

 going on, a man can not attend to more than 20 piles at once, and 

 he can not set off a lot and leave them. Of course, all the time 

 he spends on a given brush fire increases the cost per acre; but 

 it is pretty easy to determine for any given job of burning how 

 many trees you can afford to lose and whether it is cheaper to 

 burn the trees up than to save them from fire. I do not think it 

 pays, as a rule, to burn trees to save them from fire. In the past, 

 the time of burning brush on large sales appears to have been 

 determined by the time you found most convenient to burn. I 

 think that any of us who have had to fight fire during the summer 

 on a timber sale where the brush had been left unpiled or piled and 

 not burned would never lose another chance of burning brush 

 which was in a pile, or of having brush piled rather than 

 scattered. I do not know of any area where it has seemed to me 

 safe to leave brush on the ground. I might state that lodgepole 

 brush does not go to pieces so as to reduce the fire danger abso- 

 lutely inside of fifteen years. Our fire risks are so tremendous, 

 and our preparation for the suppression of fires so inadequate, 

 that taking into account the damage to the soil and all the other 

 resulting disadvantages, I am afraid that we have not yet reached 

 a point where we dare leave brush on the ground. While the 

 cost of burning is a factor, I do not think that it is a very im- 

 portant one, as we can not afford the fire risk which comes from 

 leaving unburned brush on the ground, and the additional pro- 

 tection resulting from the burning of the brush fully offsets the 

 additional cost of burning. In wind-row burning, practically clean 

 cutting, the cost is approximately 10 cents per 1,000 feet or $1 

 per acre under the worst conditions. Where approximately one- 

 tenth of a stand of trees had been cut, and the brush on that 

 stand piled, the piles averaged from 15 to 25 to the acre, and the 

 cost runs up approximately to $2.50 per acre. I do not believe 

 that I could permanently insure the area from destruction by fire 

 any cheaper than that. The display of brush burning torches on 



