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Show f Sunday August 24, 2008 DAILY HERALD AS BATTLING WILDFIRES cavernous BLM warehouse near the Boise airport that is stacked nearly to the ceiling with pallets of bulging bags. ' The building can hold 1 million pounds of seed, col- lected in the wild by com- mercial operations or cul- - ' tivated. During a busy fire season, the storehouse will be filled and emptied several times over. There are redolent sacks of antelope Utter brush . seed, Indian rice grass, Rus- -. sian wild rye, squirrel tail, : blue bunch wheat grass and arrow leaf balsam root. A walk-i- n cooler that smells . .like a menthol factory is crammed with bags of sage, seed, winterfat and forage kochia, a Eurasian native that is planted in green strips, ' wild The . . I ? . ;i: seed can cost as much per ; pound as porcini mush-rooms. A few hundred miles away, in Provo, Utah, fetter-- , al research ecologist Susan Meyer is pursuing another N tack in the cheatgrass wars.. For the last decade, she has peered, through microWAN VANDElt BRUQLoa Ancetet Tunes scopes into Petri dishes at the U,S. Forest Service Susan Meyer it searching for the perfect biological weapon against cheatgrass. Shrub Sciences Laboratory,., searching for the perfect shrunk in the Snake River . winterfat shrub scattered the landscape, biological weapon. Griggs estimates, 80 percent : V . She started her hunt after . Since Warren started of the ranchs public and around the sage offers raptor area, so has the black-- . ' another level of food and tailed jack rabbft population, years of native plant res- private grazing lands has : working in the torat ion work. I thought, acre Elko District in lS84, it the main prey for nesting burned in the last two years, .shelter'.:':''.;; 'You've got to get rid.of this, has lost more than a fifth of Incontrast, acheatgrass golden eagles. Their num- inviting more cheatgrass. 7 weed or this is all an exerbers are in turn droppingA few hours drive north, . its sage habitat to fire. Court-- i landscape is about as eco' cise in futility. : logically rich as a parking Trying to reverse the eco--. ship grounds for the threatjust outside of Boise, Idaho, . lot. Its rare to even find Mike Reliant and his colened sage grouse, crucial logical tide is maddeningly Meyer is now on her third ' difficult. winter range for mule deer, candidate, a naturally oc-- . .. lizards, Reliant said. Talk leagues at the Bureau of ; curring fungal disease she1 Land Management are wag;- -. abort a biological desert..'. and browse for pronghorn.. : Sage reseeding is a The shot-liveReliant says If all been a Sisyphean campaign annual have has nicknamed the black vaporcrapshoot, ing antelope ' there's not enough moisture. '. " ized; .. fingers of death. It attacks' grass is soft and green for ' .against fire and cheatgrass .. in dormant cheatgrass seeds, too or of months the the .. The Elko District has spent hot, in the Snake River Birds of its acouple tiny sage seeds the size of specks . ;. spring, when animals eat $40 million since 1999 reseed-- , injecting a toxin that Prey National Conservation cell division and stops of ground pepper d ry it. But for most of the year, Area. ing and rehabilitating the out and wont germinate. ' Reliant is coordinator of charred lands, with limited germination. cheatgrass is dead, resemYou know, she says, Freezes can kiU infant plants. the Great Basin Restoration success, it's a system where bling a parched, scraggly '; if I could actually, do some-- . lawn. it's easier to lose things than Another fire will wipe them.' Initiative, a government eft it k to get them back, Knick out. In the past, lightning fires . fort launched in 1999 after thing about this, I would be the savior of the West. said. From Frederic Renting; a chunk of the basin bigger . . probably burned through Simply figuring out the ; She is not ton paintings to Gene Autry than Delaware burned in 10 ' Wyoming big sage lands in ; best reseeding techniques' ' very hopefuL On a hot day last summer; has required an inventor's :. cycles ranging from sevsongs and John Wayne movdays. The program sponsors the air smelted like a barbe- eral decades to more than a native plant research and . ies, the cultural imagery Of ingenuity, In the 1980s, cue and the nearby Wasatch the first sage reseeding at- - .. the West is steeped in North century. But in cheatgrass reseeding. promotes ' When Reliant started American sagebrush Ar- -, .., country, the flames return Range was wrapped in a ..tempts were made from kill-- .; the back of a pickup truck.; temisia trident at ae. gauzy veil of smoke from. every five to 10 years working at Snake River in 7 Then the Jarbridge sage-bras- h 1981, the conservation area ,. the massive Milford Flat fire ing whatever baby sage had ' Cowboys bed down in it... : to the south-- . seeder was devised. was mostly sage. Now it's .' Wagon.trainsrollpast.it. managed to take hold since In the lab, Meyer had just It worked like a big fertil- The sun sets on its rolling mostly cheatgrass. In the last t the previous blaze, 15 years, 70 percent of it has . made a depressing discovizer spreader pulled behind The exotic species was expanses, In The CaU of the Wild, a truck, followed by a row burned at least once. ery. The slimy little black probably introduced to the West in the late. 1800s as a the early 20th century poet Near a road, Reliant fingers of the fungus were , of rolling tires to press the ' contaminant in wheat seed walks into a remnant patch Robert Service asks: seeds into the soil. growing out of the seeds of i brought by farmers from of Wyoming big sage, the wild rye, meaning it can in- -. Have you wandered In the Aerial drops have been , feet not just the hated eheat- -' Russia and Eastern Europe. dominant sagebrush of the the favored method because wilderness, the sagebrush -- Millions of sheep and Great Basin. ..' desolation, grass but desirable plants they can quickly cover large levels The bunch-gras- s cattle then cleared the. way as well areas. But they often dont The. woody graytyeen- : for the prolific invader, where the cattle graze? , work because the sage seed Even if she develops the leafed Shrub, about 3 feet whose spiky seeds traveled . Have you whistled bits' tall, provides wildlife with a ' spreads too lightly on the V ultimate cheatgrass killer, ' on livestock fur and coloof ragtime at the end of all kitchen and bedtoanu food Meyer, doubts society will ground. Federal researchers .' and cover from snow and nized areas stripped of na-- f want to invest the hundreds .. , are working with engineers creation, of millions of dollars it tive grasses by overgrazing, And learned to know the : to modify farm seeding ' searing sun. The moss-lik- e would take to restore the crust spreading between to deserts little, ways? By the 1930s, cheatgrass had sage equipment apply j settled in. Jem Griggs started work- Periodic wet years with other natives . the plants acts like a lawn, sage country of cowboy ' in recent decades helped it In a big fire year, the de- -. lore. From the Rockies to ing as a cowboy on the absorbing moisture and ! mand for seed is enormous. the Sierra Nevada, it's going holding the soil in place. The conquer more territory , Maggie Creek Ranch west Much of it comes from a of Elko 17 years ago. For As the sage acreage has to be one giant weed patch. the last decade, he has been LOS ANGELES TIMES ELKO, Nev.-Ar- ound every bend of the dirt road, Tom Warren recites another name, another date. The Sheep, the Amazon, the Winters, the Suzie. The list goes on and on. ' It is a chronicle of loss, of wildfires ravaging one s, of America's mythic the sweeping, lonely , sagebrush country of the . land-scape- .. On mountainside after mountainside here, in valley after valley, the richly tex- tured, muted green of sage. has yielded to a monotonous, dried-osea of dirty-bloncheatgrass. The annual grass, a tough native of Eurasia, is fueling a devastating cycle of fire that is wiping sage from vast stretches of the Great Basin and, with it.an ancient ecosystem that is homfc to the pronghorn antelope, strutting sage grouse and other .. prized wildlife. The Great Basin, which swallows most of Nevada and reaches into parts of Utah, Idaho, Oregon ami. California, is the epicenter of a plague of wildfire driven fay the spread of nonnative plants. Some at the biggest : conflagrations in. the nation over the last decade have burned in this cold high ' . desert region. ;'. The Winters fire took out, that mountain and went on for 20 miles," says Warren, a rehabilitation manager for the U.S. Bureau of Land .: Management, He is glancing out. the window of a govern-- ! merit SUV as it bumps across the backcountry of northeastern Nevada. r He points out the 150,000 acres charred by the Sheep fire. It consumed islands of. shrub that had survived an earlier blaze; Not even the skeletons of sage are left.. Its like that across much of thel3fMTiillion-acr- e Great . ut d . hard-to-colle- - , . 'r. . . V : V . . . - . ; . . . . . - . . , '. . d dis-rup- ts . . . - ' : ' . . . . . . Basin. . : . : . - . . If something hasnt . burned yet, its waiting to bum, said Steve Knick, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Idaho. "Just the rapidity with which the landscape has . changed is unbelievable. .: Grassy aliens carpet the ground, They dry art quickly and bum in aninstant. When lightning strikes a bed of dead cheatgrass, its like . dropping a match into a lake of kerosene. ; Country that used to bum or every fewdecades is burning once a century every few years. Cheatgrass fed the largest blaze in Utah's recorded history, last year's Milford Flat fire. It galloped at freeway speeds across 383,000 acres of rangeland, incinerating .manager.- - , hundreds of cattle. FIRE AND THE GREAT BASIN My favorite smell is sagebrush after a rain, Griggs In the Mojave and Sono- 1 In UmM tb J mUUun acimm am Uim UnMUw ilM oTQivna Oounty. have iiuniid In ilw UA Bumu of Lmd ktanafnni!iit,i Elka Dutrlct. ran deserts, where lightning says. Its kind of musky, ' bwiianats' E&2SZ3I 200 2006 Fin fires historically stayed small fresh,almost bitter. It much what and isolated because there pretty represents I love. I love the cattle opera-- . wasn't much to burn, flames are following the spread of tion I'm on and the country tassel-headewe're in and the place I get. red brome. In 2005, after high rainfall to raise my family . Lately it is the smell of produced a luxuriant crop of brome and other exotic burning sage that has wafted across Maggie Creek Ranch. grasses, nearly 1 million acres of the Mojave were Last year the Redhouse charred. Gomplex fire hit. The year ' Air pollution may be abetbefore, it was the Suzie. . an ResearchIt on afternoon started invaders. the ting about 2 o'clock with several ers have found that high lightning strikes, and by 9 nitrogen deposits are fertil-- . oclock the next morning it izing nonnative grasses in was 30.000 acres, Griggs parts of southern California. recalled. In southern Nevada, experiHe tried to stop the ments have shown that brome thrives at elevated levels by himself. I was 2 there with a dozer, when it of carbon dioxide expected was 20 or 30 acres! But it in the atmosphere by midmoved so fast I couldn't get century. ' "vVvA-'- , around it. Nowhere is. the grim mat- -' i if. ffgLTWriflM, won Omplf fwrtlisy By BiwiX linsu two the Between invasive and of blazes, wildfire ing Ullia iRHtNII iMMfHnnwf grasses more evident than in' the huge Elko District of the Bureau of Land Management INSIDIOUS INVADER in northeastern Nevada. This Cheatarnu, an Invuive epedea neddcntatljr bitroduced to the West by aettlen wtx carried tt In bass o Impure wheat seed. Infests mudi of the Great Buin. Bacaun It buma endless country of jagged mora readily than native plants, tt haa graatly Increased tha rata of wUdnre, artptng out aaoebnuh on milllona of acres. mountains and gently sloping basins is burning with a regularity that is brutal and on a scale that is staggering. In 2006, 950,000 acres of the district were scorched, about the size of Rhode' Island and roughly a tenth of . all the wildlands that burned : in the entire United States that year. Last summer, fire ' t raced across nearly 600,000 acres. The blazes can be traced by color. If the land is tan, it has burned and turned to a i'-f VA" thick mat of cheatgrass, enTha ehaatgraas The cheatgrass Cheatgrass slays i A prolific lulu K itarta suring that it will bum some haulm Fka. owrgrvinf, acts as kindling to ignite rowma hi oann ipnn graen tor a couple of months mlucia cycle starts again. As liras bum oonstnjctKin. iwd produoar. chaatprasa haa more. Whether cruising ttucli Into mats. availabla watar and hotter horning plants, such as oonaurum and than dnas mora frequently, young saga . uw and ottwr acthntm that aharp rmcroicopic barba lhal down Interstate 80 to Reno nature Tha dansa. nutrients Khda natma graasaa and toa sage sseo bank are attach to aw in Waatoch and sagebrush or pmyon pins. damaca nativa (raurn provida of ehaatgraas Inoraasaa tha ara still dormant. wild animals, haiptog it spread. an operang for cneatgraaa. or dodging the washboards destroyed. rtianca ot ignUion and toe rata on a primitive road in the at which In spreads. middle of nowhere, its hard b OraNlei rrp&smt Ip Mfif to escape that khaki stain on lOAIBA ISMWBB i 4frtf IMM . . . . . . . . : . . : . . . . : . : .. . . : . high-prote- in . . . d . , . . Red-hou- AV' ' A ,W : . - f ir j .' t d ' . lw ' |