As the Ferris fire tore through the San Juan National Forest over the Fourth of July weekend, firefighters raced to protect an interesting resource.
It wasn’t water. It wasn’t cattle. And it wasn’t power lines, although they fought to save those, too.
While the flames that grew out of a lightning strike on June 27 were driven by erratic winds and the driest summer in memory, the men and women with chainsaws, shovels and pulaskis did everything they could to save … wood.
They were in the Glade, near Narraguinnep Canyon north of Dolores. The San Juan National Forest agency conducts thinning operations there, fostering growth of a diversity of tree ages and sizes across the landscape that burn at different rates, keeping fire closer to the ground and making it easier to manage.
And here’s the reason the firefighters were in a forest, in a fire, trying to save timber.
The small-diameter logs the feds cut are bucked and split and loaded into trucks bound for tribal communities throughout the Southwest and Four Corners region.
That’s because a fact of life on the Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute and other reservations is that large numbers of people — thousands in some places — don’t have electricity to warm their homes in the winter.
For years, Navajo and Hopi communities could get coal from the Kayenta Coal Mine for free or at a reduced cost to heat their houses. But when the mine closed in 2019, tribal members lost their fuel source and began burning anything they could to produce heat in the winter, including clothes, furniture, pasture fencing and sagebrush, a spokesperson from the San Juan National Forest said.
Forest thinning leaves behind huge piles of biomass — trees, brush, grass and leaves that become fuel for wildfires — and the Forest Service and several partners have searched for innovative ways to clear it.
Out of these concurrent needs came a program that benefits the San Juan National Forest with the treatment and removal of hazardous fuels, creates an outlet for the byproduct (wood) which benefits tribal members and gives young people like 18-year-old Tyler Cly, a member of the Navajo Nation, opportunities.
It’s called Wood for Life, and Cly says it’s showing him how “a good collaboration of people helping people” can unify cultures and bring relief.
Wood for Life and Native Americans
While the Ferris fire raged, crews protected stacks of logs, known as decks, earmarked for Wood for Life, a partnership between the Forest Service, the National Forest Foundation, tribes, nongovernmental organizations and conservation corps that promotes tribal engagement within national forests.
Wood for Life grew out of discussions in 2018 and 2019 about what to do with the trees cut after forest thinning. The partners began to coalesce after the closure of the Kayenta Coal Mine and the decommissioning of the Navajo Generating Station.
In the years since, the Wood for Life partnership has delivered 32,620 cords of wood collected from 13 national forests to wood banks on or near tribal land that provide fuel for 6,498 homes.
Last year it sent 141 truckloads or roughly 2,100 cords of wood removed from the San Juan National Forest to tribal members in the Four Corners region free of charge, according to Abe Proffitt, spokesperson for the national forest.
Proffitt said some of the decks in the Glade were lost “due to very active fire behavior combined with nearby logging slash.” But many were saved.
The logs wouldn’t have been sold because small-diameter trees, branches, shrubs and brush have low or no market value, and leaving them in piles in the forest increases the risk of fire, burdening forest managers with the task of constantly seeking ways to get rid of the material.
At some point, probably long after the fire is extinguished, a team from the Southwest Conservation Corps will drive to the site, collect the logs and take them to reservations in the region, where they’re needed.
“A lot of Native homes aren’t well-insulated, so the heat just escapes and people have to keep burning and burning and burning and burning to stay warm,” said Cly, who works for the Southwest Conservation Corps, with offices in Durango and Salida. “And a lot of the people are elders and have health problems so they’re not able to get wood. It’s a really hard type of life that we live.”
The Wood for Life Tribal Fuelwood Initiative has been helping tackle this problem since 2020. The program works in the Rockies, the Southwest, the Intermountain West and the Northern Rockies. Crews collect wood from 10 national forests including the San Juan, the Kaibab, the Coconino, the Sawtooth and the Custer Gallatin. They deliver wood to the Shoshone-Paiute and Shoshone-Bannock tribes in Idaho as well as the Crow and Northern Cheyenne tribes in Montana and tribes in Colorado and the Four Corners region.
The San Juan National Forest partners with 15 wood banks, including different chapter governments on the Navajo Nation, the Warm Elders family-owned wood bank in Bluff, Utah, the Utah Navajo Health System, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and other organizations.
But the National Forest Foundation’s impact reaches beyond clearing slash, promoting forest health and helping Indigenous communities.
Preserving tribal relations in the Trump era
It wasn’t until 2021 that the Forest Service started formalizing partnerships and agreements with tribes to co-steward public lands.
By 2022, they had 11 new agreements to advance tribal co-stewardship of national forests.
In 2023, the Forest Service declared tribal relationships “essential and positive assets,” and predicted a bright future: “Together, Tribes and Agencies — including the Forest Service — can accomplish projects and programs that affect positive change to the country’s ecosystems, economies and social systems, especially those in Native America,” their statement read.
But the Trump administration’s recent reorganization of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the U.S. Forest Service, has many state and federal lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse and U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, both Democrats, worried these relationships could suffer during one of the worst fire seasons the West has ever seen.
The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums, which supports the work of Indigenous cultural institutions, is also concerned the restructuring could upset access to ancestral lands and sacred sites, protection of cultural and natural resources, ongoing tribal consultation and support for tribal forestry and coordination around wildfire response and cultural burning.
“But the National Forest Foundation can be a convener and bring partners together,” said Marly Saunders, southwest Colorado senior associate for the National Forest Foundation, “and since we work so closely with the Forest Service, we can kind of connect wood coming off of the forest … to the wood banks we work with, where the wood utilization network and economy is really complex.”
“The NFF remains committed to advancing healthy, resilient forests and supporting the Forest Service mission,” Catherine Cody, a National Forest Foundation spokesperson, said in an email. “But everybody’s bringing something to the table here, and we try to be that connecting force to help get the wood from somewhere where it’s not helpful to somewhere where it is.”
They’re also helping tribes overcome barriers to sourcing, storing and delivering their own wood.
“We’re helping get them the tools they need for their own fire mitigation, scale their own processes and build their own infrastructure,” Cody said.
How wood is enhancing Tyler Cly’s life
Tyler Cly learned about the Southwest Conservation Corps on a flyer he saw while living in Aztec, New Mexico.
“I always thought I would go into conservation work,” he said, “and then I saw there was an Indigenous crew for Indigenous kids.”
Cly wanted to help his elders and be outside, which working on the corps was perfect for, because they spend a week at a time doing things like trail building, fire mitigation, log-bucking and de-weeding.
They work at Mesa Verde National Park, on the San Juan National Forest, with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and with the Southern Ute Tribe, and sometimes they go on adventures like a 10-day raft trip on the Grand Canyon, he said.
Wood for Life works with another organization targeted to Indigenous youth called the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, which has offices on the Navajo Nation, in Acoma and Zuni pueblos in New Mexico, in the Hopi Kykotsmovi Village in Arizona and in Albuquerque. Its goal is to cultivate a new generation of local land stewards through partnerships with tribal communities and land managers to do things like historical preservation and traditional agriculture, stream restoration and trail reconstruction while blending traditional culture and language into their work.
When school is in session Cly studies accounting at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, but when he’s not in the field he’s thinking about it.
He likes how the crews he works with aren’t just Indigenous kids but non-Indigenous ones, too, and that they get to see what life is really like where he lives.
On one of his wood deliveries, his crew had both.
They visited a 102-year-old woman whose house wasn’t in the best condition: “She had, you know, tarps trying to cover her windows from the cold, and people were feeling very sad about how natives are living out here,” he said.
But Cly had “created the original idea to start a wood bank hosted by the Southwest Conservation Corps at their Old Fort location in Hesperus, Colorado,” Saunders said, “and the program has grown immensely from that original idea, distributing dozens of cords of fuelwood via distribution days and community drop offs each year.”
When Cly ponders his impact, he recalls the elderly woman.
“She was crying and telling us how extremely happy she was to see all types of youth coming together to get better help for people out here.”