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On an afternoon last summer, Brian Flynn sat on his back porch after work. As he drank a beer, he noticed a column of smoke rise above Grand Mesa. Despite all of the intel gathered during his workday that the Spring Creek fire was extinguished, the plume suggested his mission had changed.
The next day, the wind pushed the fire toward a part of the plateau south of Parachute, where he knew Ute artifacts were scattered. Flynn and his team rushed to defend them, thinning the forest surrounding a wickiup, a dwelling made of sticks and brush, to provide a fire break.
In the end, the wickiup was saved but the team could not make it to another Ute campsite in time. The fire burned through the site, exposing stone tools and a hearth to erosion.
Flynn isn’t just a firefighter — he’s one of three fire and fuels archaeologists for the Bureau of Land Management in Colorado. As wildfires increase in frequency and intensity due to climate change, artifacts identified by BLM land surveys are at higher risk of being damaged or lost.
When fires aren’t burning, the archaeologists survey the land for pieces of history, while assessing the risks that fire and mitigation tactics pose to these artifacts. When they’re called to the fire line, they make quick decisions to protect the sites, like where to build fire breaks to slow the fire, or when to let the fire burn and wrap structures in foil. The approach creates a balance between forest management and artifact preservation that values the land just as much as the historic artifacts it holds.
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The federal government is putting more funding toward forest and wildfire management, but an increase in funding doesn’t always mean more boots on the ground.
“We need more people,” Flynn said, especially in fields like archaeology.
Crystal Rizzo, the cultural preservation director for the Southern Ute Tribe, agrees. “Having additional resources is extremely important,” she said. More specifically, she is interested in getting more Native youth involved.
The Southern Ute are working to bolster their cultural preservation department by having some of their staff get Red Card certified, a rigorous training that qualifies them to be behind the fire line, providing traditional knowledge when a fire ignites.
What it takes to get behind the fire line
Not all archaeologists are qualified to be behind the fire line. Flynn, who earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Wyoming, is among a select group who are Red Card certified, meaning they are called to the front lines of wildfires to protect everything from Ute camps to old mining cabins.
One of the biggest constraints in an emergency, Flynn explains, is time.
Archeological work done on the fire line is often ad hoc. Professional archaeologists with advanced degrees are dispatched to a fire as resource advisers for a few weeks, and consult fire crews on how and what to protect. Eventually, they have to return to their full-time jobs.
A fire and fuels archaeologist like Flynn can devote all of their time to managing forests before the fire even starts. “Being proactive — that’s how we preserve these cultural resources from fire and the aftereffects of fire,” Flynn said.
Archaeologists are especially useful behind the fire line as resource advisers, but the process to obtain a Red Card is long and arduous. They must complete 32 hours of classroom training and pass a physical test, where they walk 3 miles in less than 45 minutes while lugging a 45-pound pack.
Beyond that, there are various levels of certification. Flynn, for example, is a heavy equipment boss.
“My boss calls me a unicorn,” Flynn said. “Archaeology is such a very specific set of skills, knowledge base and methodology, and so is firefighting. These two worlds don’t necessarily come together.”
Working toward a Red Card is a hard sell to anyone with a full-time job outside of fire management. Jason Nez, a Navajo Red Card archaeologist for Grand Canyon National Park, makes a good case for resource advising, Flynn said. “He’s shown the fire organization that we can be there on the landscape during a fire in that really dynamic and dangerous environment, and still provide good information about values at risk to decision-makers.”
From suppression to prevention
For nearly a decade, Flynn worked as a Hotshot firefighter, getting called to the largest and hottest wildfires in the West. After climbing government ranks for 14 years as a firefighter and resource adviser, he’s shifted his focus to what happens before — and after — the fires burn.
In areas with archaeological sites, this sometimes involves managing vegetation by clearing out dense stands of pinyon pines, or designating an area for a controlled burn — reducing the amount of fuel a future fire has to burn.
Risks to artifacts don’t abate after a fire has burned, either. The flames char the ground, leaving the soil susceptible to erosion. By reseeding these areas with native grasses, Flynn and his team try to stop artifacts from being swept away by the next rainstorm.
“With climate change and the fires we’re seeing today,” Flynn said, “being proactive is the only way we can keep these fires at a manageable level.”
Flynn spends much of his time in the Uncompahgre National Forest, surveying the land on foot, pulling prickly pears from his pant legs and navigating around sagebrush. In some areas, dense stands of pinyon juniper and ponderosa pine crowd the landscape, evidence of the history of fire suppression in the region.
FROM LEFT: BLM fuels program manager Jeremy Spetter in the Uncompahgre National Forest on Nov. 3. While surveying the land, he clears brush away from the base of a pine. (Devin Farmiloe, Special to The Colorado Sun)
While surveying the land, Jeremy Spetter, fuels program manager at BLM in Colorado, explained that ponderosa pines have evolved with thick bark that makes them more resistant to fire. When low-intensity fires burn on their natural cycle every 20-60 years, the forests thrive. This cycle was interrupted by fire management policy that advocated for stopping fires, rather than letting them burn, allowing pinyon junipers to grow in dense patches beneath the towering ponderosa pines.
A 15-foot-tall pinyon juniper growing in close quarters with a ponderosa can become a ladder fuel during a wildfire, allowing the flames to jump into the canopy of the 50-foot pine.
Over the past 50 years, Spetter said, the spread of junipers has been dramatic. “It’s insane. We are trying to push that back and break up the continuity of fuels here.”
Living willows and other plants are crucial to contemporary Native culture
Protecting cultural artifacts is the specialty of Grand Canyon archaeolgist Nez, but his focus goes far beyond the objects themselves. “As an Indigenous person, we’re looking at landscape health,” he said. “We’re looking at ecosystem health, and we’re looking out for areas that are considered traditional tribal properties that have spiritual meaning and an emotional attachment for entire tribes.
“It’s not just the artifacts on the ground,” he said, “but it’s actually the whole system around it.”
For the Southern Ute, who have ancestral lands on the Uncompahgre Plateau, landscape-level preservation is synonymous with the preservation of their culture. “For us, the cultural resources are the plants we need for gathering for medicinal purposes, the willow we harvest for cradle boards, the trees we need to continue this way of life,” Rizzo said.
During the summer, elders from the Southern Ute Tribe take community members out to harvest willow for the hoods of the cradle boards, passing down the tradition to younger generations. Protecting willows from wildfire is one example of how important this landscape-level preservation is. “We need these resources to be here, hundreds of years down the line,” Rizzo said.
The historical approach to fire management for centuries was suppression. This active prevention of the natural cycle of fire, along with dryer and hotter seasons, has made fires burn with more frequency and intensity.
Fuels workers throughout the West are introducing techniques that work to restore the natural fire cycle and forest health. Evidence of that stewardship is scattered across the plateau. Gnarled sagebrush, chewed up by a machine called a masticator, ponderosa pines trimmed of their lower branches, and burn marks from prescribed fires create a map of this laborious effort.
“It may look like we have touched every tree in this forest, but that is because we value every tree in this forest,” Flynn explained.
For Nez, reintroducing fire into the landscape is more than a forest management practice; it is stewardship. He believes this stewardship “is a part of our tribal identities, which have been negatively affected over the past 300 years.” Prior to colonization, Indigenous people stewarded the land with fire for millenia. The result of colonial wildfire suppression, he said, is “an unhealthy forest from Maine to Oregon. From the Arctic Circle to the tip of Argentina.”
Controlled burns help protect ancient cultural objects
Back on the Uncompahgre Plateau, the fuels team had cleared away fallen leaves and debris from a large ponderosa pine. While this is done to many trees on the plateau, this ponderosa is different. It had its bark peeled away in a large section to reveal a smooth texture underneath. Trees like this are what archaeologists like Flynn refer to as a culturally modified tree.
This tree was identified by the BLM during an archaeological survey conducted before a prescribed burn. Through in-person consultations with the tribe, Flynn has learned how to recognize these trees and mark them for protection. Once a tree is cataloged, BLM reaches out to the Ute with a plan of action to protect these artifacts.
“The fuels reduction in those areas preserves the trees, especially if they’re still living,” Flynn said. “The action itself is a form of protection.”
Rizzo considers the relationship the Southern Ute have with BLM to be a “positive” one. The three Ute tribes, consisting of the Southern Ute, the Ute Mountain Ute and the Ute Indian Tribe, along with BLM, meet twice a year to debrief on preservation tactics, new artifacts that were located, and any prospective prescribed burns or other plans BLM might have that could impact Ute cultural artifacts.
There’s a lot of history written in trees.
— Brian Flynn, fire and fuels archaeologist
“I hope we can continue to have the traditional ecological knowledge combined with the work that BLM and others are doing with wildfire management,” Rizzo said, “it is really about working together and bringing both perspectives to the table.”
“There’s a lot of history written in trees,” Flynn said.
Historically, the Southern Ute would peel the bark back from trees in the spring, harvesting the sap for sustenance, but also to create a waxy substance to waterproof baskets. They would also use the harvested bark as the rigid backing of cradle boards.
Flynn and Spetter often use prescribed burns to remove fuels from near unmarked trees, too. As they patrolled a recent prescribed burn site, they explained that controlled fires provide safety from a wildfire, while also blackening the earth around it. Charred soil is rich with nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth. Flynn scraped his boot over the burned dirt. “That is going to be one happy tree,” he said.
FROM LEFT: Brian Flynn stands on charred soil. A prescribed burn removed fuels that could contribute to a fast moving fire and left behind charred soil that is rich with nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth. The yellowing of his cuff shows his pants had been exposed to the flames in the past. (Devin Farmiloe, Special to The Colorado Sun)
FROM TOP: Brian Flynn stands on charred soil. A prescribed burn removed fuels that could contribute to a fast moving fire and left behind charred soil that is rich with nitrogen, an essential nutrient for plant growth. The yellowing of his cuff shows his pants had been exposed to the flames in the past. (Devin Farmiloe, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Archaeology on the Uncompahgre Plateau
Despite a sweeping view of the West Elk Mountains in the distance, Flynn’s eyes are often trained on the ground, scanning for the smallest traces of history. A flake of lithic debitage, or rock garbage, can stop him in his tracks. Prehistoric refuse like this is an indicator of an old camp, where Ute may have made their home.
“Where people are laying their heads,” Flynn said. “Those are the sites that are really interesting.”
The wickiup saved during the Spring Creek fire is one of the sites Flynn holds dear. “It has a good view looking down into the valley,” he said. “It really transports you to a time in these people’s lives.”
Unfortunately, the site that was not saved during the Spring Creek fire contained many pieces of the lithic debitage. Most lithics can withstand the heat from fire. The concern at this site is the soil turning hydrophobic. When soil is burned, it becomes waxy and repels water. Instead of soaking into the ground, rainwater will now form a sheet on the surface, creating an unstoppable erosive river.
Flynn and his team attempted to slow this process by seeding the area to prevent the artifacts from washing away in a storm. This is a last-ditch effort, one he admits has had limited success in the past.
Not every artifact can be saved, but it helps to know where they are. For every fuels management project BLM undertakes, The National Historic Preservation Act requires that archaeologists conduct a survey prior to the start.
Kaitlyn Davis, an assistant professor of archeology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, said archaeologists conduct the cultural resource assessments to determine what type of historical property they’re looking at and how to manage the area.
“You’ll send out a crew in 20-meter transects, walking back and forth until they’ve covered the whole area that is going to have this undertaking happen, whether it be a controlled burn or something else,” Davis said.
Walking down a steep incline, Spetter recalled one of his first intense fires. He heard claims from his superiors that fires of that scale were few and far between, and he likely wouldn’t have to fight one so big again in his career, but the next fire season proved that wrong. Spetter would hear that same sentiment repeated again and again.
Since then Spetter has witnessed this increase in intensity firsthand. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, the number of acres burned within the U.S. has been on an upward trend since 1983.
As millions of acres burn across the U.S. every year, the preventive work the BLM fires and fuels team does is imperative to protecting the living and historical artifacts on our nation’s public lands.
“These archeological sites are the living museum of our nation’s history,” Flynn explains. “We should do everything we can within the parameters of safety to protect these resources.”