June 5, 2025
Article written by Sarah Reith

The newly formed Round Valley Prescribed Burn Association held its first burn on May 30, scorching 55 acres of grass at the airport just outside town. Since grant funds became available through the county about a year ago, the PBA has been offering trainings and spreading the word about the benefits of controlled fire.

Lourance Hall, the co-director of the Round Valley PBA, said the Covelo Volunteer Fire Department and CAL FIRE identified the airport as an ideal place for a burn due to frequent vehicle fires that break out near the facility’s abundant crop of tall grass every year. By purposely burning the fuels before the hot, dry season advances, the agencies hope that any unexpected fires will be easy to douse before they spread widely.

“The other advantage of this,” Hall added, “is that by creating a black area, if we get something like the August Complex again, we have a place to evacuate to.” With the rodeo grounds, the recreation center, and the school nearby, the airstrip could serve as an ideal gathering point for humans and animals alike. “It’s kind of a logical safe space,” she reasoned. Fire, she added, is welcome in the community. The airport is a historical location for deliberate burns in Covelo. Hall recalled that, up until the early 2000’s, when it no longer had a burn boss on staff, the local fire department burned the area every year. Inaugurating the new PBA in this location, she declared, is “bringing it back around.”

The kickoff burn was a large regional gathering. About 70 people from a wide variety of firefighting and nonprofit agencies converged from around the county, as well as Calistoga, Kettenpom, Klamath, and Hawkins Bar, among others. Everyone wore yellow turnouts, heavy boots and hard hats as they fanned out around the perimeter of the airstrip. For its first burn, the Round Valley PBA worked with Torchbearr, a non-profit organization led by retired US Forest Service burn bosses that lends its expertise to smaller entities. Terry Warlick, a former firefighting Battalion Chief in Covelo, also retired from the Forest Service and went to work with his old colleague Scot Steinbring, who co-founded Torchbearr and is the Director of Operations. “After I retired, I was ready to play in this PBA private arena to kind of share my knowledge,” Warlick explained. “That’s how we do it.”

There was a certain amount of waiting before the main event got going. Then there was some more waiting, as weather monitors reported on the temperature, humidity, and wind conditions. Every fire has a different prescription, or set of conditions under which it’s safe to start burning. On this particular day, no one could light a drip torch until it was below eighty degrees, with a wind speed under ten miles an hour. May 30 provided a foretaste of summer, with dry heat lingering at 94 degrees until well after six o’clock pm. “It’s patience,” said Steinbring. “There is no hurry in prescribed fire. There have been many times where our burn bosses have said, you know, it’s just not a good day. And that’s where we need to empower our folks to see what a good day is, and what a bad day is, so we set them up for success in the future.”

Everyone in the state knows by now that a bad day is when a wildfire gets out of control and tears through a community. In 2020-2021, the Slater Fire burned over 200 homes in Happy Camp, a small community in the Klamath National Forest in Siskiyou County. Steinbring worked as a Fire Management Officer for the Karuk Tribe, which was hit hard by the Slater Fire, before he decided to offer his expertise in prescribed burns to communities across the region. Most of his staff is in California, but he’s traveled to a number of other states, as well.

Jewelina Acosta, who met Steinbring when they were both working for the Karuk tribe, got involved with prescribed fire for the ecological benefits. “When it comes to our native plants and resources, fire really helps with keeping away insects and disease,” she said. She didn’t grow up with large-scale prescribed burns, but recalled that when she was younger, her grandmother used fire to help cultivate willow plants, which are used in traditional basket weaving. She’s expecting prescribed fire to play a big role in her future, too. “I didn’t really think about doing fire or anything until I worked with the Karuk tribe, but now it is something that I’m looking forward to doing, pretty much permanently,” she reflected.

Riley Dizon has been working for Torchbearr for about a month, and says some of his family members in San Diego were initially a little worried about his career path. “When I started this whole fire thing, they got all mad at me, like, you better not be starting no fires,” he reported. “They still have a wary mindset, but I think as I tell them more about it, they’re getting more and more comfortable with it. I think it’s more about having the knowledge of what prescribed burning does, how it reduces wildfire risk. Wildfires are way more dangerous. There’s no resources on hand for whenever a wildfire happens, it just pops up out of nowhere. (With) controlled burns, we have resources in place, we pick the day, we do everything we can to make sure it’s the perfect situation to burn and get rid of the fuels, so if a fire does start there, it will go nowhere.”

The fire at the airport finally started at about quarter to eight. One crew lit a test burn along the fenceline as the shadows of the mountains stretched across the grass. Ribbons of flame leapt through the fuel, merged, then subsided into crackling smoke. Emily Lord, a GrizzlyCorps fellow who is working with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, described how the flames were being deployed, less than fifteen minutes after the first spark. The fire was already about the length of a football field, and crew leads were calling in reports from their positions on walkie-talkies. Crews toting drip torches full of gasoline and diesel were lighting the grass on the north and south ends of the airport. The north edge of the fire was pointing straight into the wind, like a boat tacking sideways. The crews created strips of fire, and controlled its behavior by moderating the distance between the strips. “Depending on the spacing between the strips, we’ll see more extreme fire behavior if the strips are further apart. So if they want to keep it really controlled,” Lord explained, “they’ll put the strips close together. And because the wind is pushing the fire into the strip before it, the part of the fire that’s going to be the biggest and the fastest, going with the wind, is called head fire.” The crews made sure they kept the head fire off the road, and let the wind chase it across the grass within the area that had been designated as the burn site.

The sun went down fast, casting a pastel pinkish light over the smoke. As the last of the flames lit up the night, eight-year-old Asuxiim, also known as Sugar, cruised the perimeter in an ATV with Warlick. She had traveled to Covelo from Trinity County with Steinbring and her mother, and spent much of the day riding her scooter around the rec center. She’s been to a few burns, and has even lent a hand with a torch. She was prepared to indulge questions about fire, but didn’t seem to find it at all extraordinary. She thought the fire in the airport was “really fun, but when it gets too smoky, I have to hold my breath for a bit.” She added that she likes to light fires, “but not wildfires, because those are dangerous. These are safe fires, so I don’t freak out.” She recalls the first time she helped to light a fire: “It was up a little mountain, and there was a lot of grass. Scot, who I call Big Mac, gave me a drip torch and just told me to drip it, and then it would start a fire.” She stood waiting for the next question. Then she noticed that the moon shining through the smoke looked like the letter C, and that a friendly horse in the pasture across the road had two colors in its tail.

The fire subsided. It was time for a late dinner. The people of Round Valley had made a refuge from fire, on a patch of blackened ground.