Continuing my conversation with Norm Walker, retired USFS District Fire Chief, I asked about land management in the San Jacintos. "This is a relatively small tract of land, surrounded by population. There is nothing to repopulate it in the event of a large fire. We should treat it like a wild animal park in San Diego. If a fire wiped out half the land, many species of animals and plants simply would not come back," he said.

We discussed three land management tools: mechanical thinning, herbicides, and prescribed fire. Norm views all of these as useful tools, but he sees fire as the most natural as well as the most cost-effective.

I asked Norm why we should not just leave nature alone, as some would like. "The problem is that fire suppression over the years has created a man-made environment. If we let the lightning fires burn in the summer, we would return to a natural environment, but we would have some devastating fires." He went on to say that old, thick, mature stands would be wiped out in large, hot fires, and that "Given how the climate is changing, I am not sure they would return. I am not sure we would want to do that experiment."

Norm argued that by suppressing fires, we have already intervened. But fire and its benefits can be reintroduced in carefully controlled ways. Burning parts of the landscape into a mosaic pattern replicates one of nature's essential processes on our mountain, which Norm believes is essential to effective land management.

Norm spoke of the effects of prescribed burns, such as animals thriving in the mosaic patterns. "After a low-intensity fire, deer will come out and roll in the ash. (It removes ticks.) Raptors have more open areas for hunting. Many animals come to eat the nutritious shoots that come up quickly after the burn. And in a mosaic pattern, there is still cover for small animals from predators."

Norm was once assigned to Mt Palomar. He recalled that the Manzanita was so old and tall that there were large areas without deer because there was no food for them. The deer went instead to private lands that had been cleared and had grass and newer shrubs to eat. Fires have since cleared the mature chaparral.

"There was a learning curve with burning." Norm points out. But ongoing research answered basic questions on where, how, and when to burn. "We learned up here that early winter is the best time to burn, that it best mimics the natural process."

I asked Norm why residents should care about land management in the surrounding forest. "People need to support a healthy forest because it's the reason they live up here. If the thousand acres around Idyllwild burned the aesthetics would be awful. It would be black sticks for 50 years." Since no one would want to visit, business would be badly hurt. And indirect costs are extraordinary. "A study of the Old Fire in San Bernardino estimated downstream effects at $1 Billion. Water loss, damage to water filtration systems, species damage, soil damage, erosion, were tremendously costly."

Finally, I asked if residents could play a role in forest health. "I have always thought that citizens have more horsepower with elected officials than government employees," he said, smiling.