THE CISPUS BURN. 



A Discussion of the Present Condition of the Burn and Plans' 

 For Its Improvement. 



By E. J. Fenby, 



On the second day of September, 1902, a fire of unknown 

 origin, but generally supposed to have been set by a prospector 

 to aid him in his search for metal bearing rock, burned over 

 73,600 acres of timber land on the Cispus watershed in the 

 Rainier National Forest. The sources of the Cispus river are 

 the glaciers on Mt. Adams and the Goat Rocks, on the summit 

 of the Cascade mountains. The river flows w^estward in the 

 shape of a sickle for fifty miles to its confluence with the Cowlitz 

 river. The river flows in a northwesterly and westerly direction 

 for 12 miles through the northern part of the burn. There are 

 three separate bodies of timber in the interior of the tract which 

 escaped the fire ; they are confined to the bottoms of deep canyons 

 and comprise in all 9,400 acres of land. Practically all the tim- 

 ber on the burn is dead. There are clusters of green trees in 

 coves and other sheltered places and here and there an oc- 

 casional living tree in the open, but green trees are too few and 

 far apart to serve as seed trees for any considerable area. 



The Cispus Valley, through the burn, is from an eighth to a 

 half mile wide, and the mountains facing the valley rise abruptly 

 from the river bottom, from an elevation of 1,400 feet to 5,000 

 feet or more. Facing the valley the slopes have north and south 

 exposures. The main tributaries of the river, which flow through 

 the burn, run in a northerly direction through deep canyons, the 

 sides of the canyons then have east and west exposures. The 

 rock formation over most of the tract is basaltic and the soil is 

 a loose coarse volcanic ash, locally known as "pumice stone." 

 This increases' in depth towards the southwestern portion of the 

 burn which is in the vicinity of Mt. St. Helens, an extinct volcano 

 cone and the source of the "pumice stone." The chief character- 

 istic of this soil is its inability to retain moisture, but although 

 it is deficient in fertility for agricultural purposes it can neverthe- 

 less be classed as good forest land. 



