LOLO — For those who live in wildfire-prone areas, like up Highway 12 outside of Lolo, the threat, and sometimes the aftermath, of a wildfire can bring immense financial and emotional challenges.
This comes in the face of increasing the resilience or rehabilitating the property.
But organizations, like Montana Forest Consultants, are dedicated to helping property owners rehabilitate their land after a wildfire tears through.
Watch how Montana Forest Consultants is helping land recover following wildfires:
“Our forests are no longer in a state that they historically would be in,” said Montana Forest Consultants CEO Zachary Bashoor. “It's not burning in the way that it used to, and so leaving it for nature to take care of it, nature is not taking care of it necessarily.”
Through the help of The Climate Trust, partially funded through the USDA and administered by a non-profit in Oregon, they’re bringing one property owner’s land back to a healthy state after a wildfire swept through several mountains within her property.
Montana Forest Consultants uses the funding, typically a $10,000 figure for a single owner, to help in reforestation, vegetation management, and debris removal.
“Reforestation typically looks like establishing trees, whether through natural means or through planting and getting trees back into areas that have either been burned or historically cut,” said Bashoor.
“There's a lot of maintenance that comes after planting trees. A) You have to make sure that they're getting adequate water,” said Bashoor. "B) You have to check on the trees. You know, often browsing from ungulates like deer and elk are a pretty large issue.”
There is also the issue of ungulates eating the saplings.
“Often you'll put browse protectors on these little nets and they're to keep deer and elk from chewing on the seedling once it's planted," Bashoor said. “So it's a lot of work.”
Bashoor has been working on one property owner’s land for almost a decade, after a prescribed burn went out of control.
“The landowner calls this area the wall and this is where the fire behavior changed significantly from high intensity to more mixed to lower intensity, down further towards the house,” said Bashoor at the edge of dozens of burnt trees.
Bashoor says that the management of private owner land will take a century, if not longer, to come to full fruition. After which, the management will more than likely have to continue.
“It's a labor of love," Bashoor told MTN.
