1 88 Forestry Quarterly. 



Next year these trees will be dead and thoroughly dry, and many 

 of the dead leaves will still be clinging to the branches, and the 

 fire problem, will be, as before, unsolved. In other words it 

 leaves everything in fine shape for the next fire, which will be 

 hotter and fiercer than the one before ; it makes the matter of 

 fire protection worse, in the long run, not better. That this is 

 fact and not theory, has been proven over and over again, in 

 that fires burn on these areas, with greater damage than on 

 the "unprotected ones." A lumber company in the Northern 

 Sierras, every year resorts to a method of "light-burning" on its 

 cut-over areas. This method is simply to start a fire in last year's 

 slashings and not bother about it until it threatens valuable prop- 

 erty. This is done to render the cut-over areas fire-proof, so 

 to speak, and thus protect their logging camps, mills, and timber- 

 lands from fire. A good illustration as to how efficient this 

 method is to protect valuable property is the following: this 

 company moved its logging camp on the area that has been 

 "light-burned" the year before, and proceeded to burn off the ad- 

 jacent area, declaring that all danger had been removed by "light- 

 burning" and that the camp was safe. Accordingly the ad- 

 jacent area was fired and left to its own salvation, and before 

 anyone knew about it the fire had reached the "safe" area where 

 it fed on the dry and charred slashings of the last fire, became 

 a conflagration and carried everything before it, camp, timber, 

 and all. 



From figures now available from actual experiments in "light- 

 burning" it appear that this is a costly process. The cost 

 of this method of protection varies from 50c and $1.00 per 

 acre, depending entirely upon conditions, and how thoroughly 

 the cleaning-up work is done. The preparation of the ground 

 costs from 40c to 75c per acre, and the burning from loc to 25c. 

 As a matter of fact in this case, only the valuable pines and firs 

 are treated in this way, and these constitute only about two-thirds 

 of the merchantable stand. 



For the big timber holders of the West to adopt this plan would 

 mean an enormous expense. At a cost of from 50 cents to $1.50 

 per acre it would mean an expenditure of from $10,000,000 to 

 $30,000,000 every three years in the case of the 20,000,000 acres 

 of forest lands in the State of California alone. This would mean 



