CARNELIAN BAY, Calif. – The forest skirting the Carnelian Woods Avenue neighborhood now stands much healthier than the forest that resided there before. A pile burning project there is nearing completion. It’s the last leg of a larger fuels mitigation project that included forest thinning.

“We have good tree spacing,” North Tahoe Fire Protection District’s April Shackelford pointed out to the me as we stood among the trees at the site. “We have a few decent snags (standing dead trees), meaning, wildlife habitat,” the forest fuels manager continued, a point driven home with each peck we witnessed a woodpecker hone on one of these snags.

Even with the thinning, Shackelford said there are still more trees than ideal, but the 78-acre site’s report card is much better than it was before.

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As we toured the site, we were initially met with contrasting black soot circles in the snow, remnants of the 1,950 piles at the start of the project. We proceeded up the hill towards the remaining piles that crews were igniting. I could smell the smoke before I could see it. There were only 116 piles left to burn on the day I visited, which the crew hoped to finish within the week.

The piles originated from the contracted Sierra Nevada Forestry Services’ thinning project in 2022. Shackelford’s crews began burning the piles the following year in the fall/winter of 2023/2024, completing 68 acres. That left around 10 acres of piles this winter destined for ignition by torches filled with two-parts diesel and one part gasoline.

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Shackelford explained it’s best to burn piles within one year, two years max. Piles start to become habitat or get compressed down and become hard to ignite if left longer.

The California Tahoe Conservancy funded the project, which NTFPD oversees. The project showcases how important these partnerships between public agencies and a push for fuel mitigation projects on private properties, highlighted here on Carnelian Woods Townhomes Association property.

“And as far as the fire district’s mission on reducing fuels and keeping the community safe,” Shackelford told me, “I need to go reduce fuels regardless of ownership and so what I’m finding is a lot of it’s private land.”

While state and federal lands have had fire management plans in place for four to five decades, private lands don’t often get the same attention. In the Tahoe basin, private land is often between neighborhoods as well as between state and federal land. Shackelford has joined the push to move these types of projects forward on larger private properties to fill in those gaps.

In her pursuit, Shackelford has found an abundance of partnerships among state and federal land managers in the form of both funding and hands for these private land projects. “We all realize the need, for community, for habitat, for everything.”

The partnerships don’t stop at the fire district, HOA and conservancy. CAL FIRE, Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District, California Conservation Corps and California National Guard all assisted with the pile burning. These partnerships became all the more apparent recently as agencies would fill in when others were called away to the Los Angeles fires.

The collaborative work restores fire to the landscape, which Shackelford says provides a function to the landscape that is as natural as rain and sunshine.

“If we don’t have fire,” Shackelford said on our walk through the site, “it will have us. ” The smoke from the burn piles came into view.

Prior to the widespread fire suppression that occurred in the U.S. for over a century now, fire used to return to the landscape at intervals between 2-28 years, the manager explained.

“When you have a natural fire return interval, you don’t get as much vegetation on the landscape, so when fire runs through there, you have a lot more likelihood of burning the small stuff in the understory and keeping your big vegetation alive,” Shackelford said and explained the other benefits fire has, including nutrient cycling.

The century-long suppression of fire has created a backlog on the landscape, evidenced by an overabundance of vegetation, which means more severe fires.

“So the ecosystem really starts spelling it out that it hasn’t had fire for a long time…” Shackelford explained and said another sign is an abundance of fir trees.

That’s because the lack of fire on a landscape increases shade, which fir trees prefer. The resulting increase in fir trees can have dangerous implications when it comes to fire.

“They tend to invite fire to crawl up the bark into the canopy much more than a pine does.” This is due to their more flammable terpenes and lower branches.

As we walked through treatment site with snow crunching beneath us, Shackelford pointed out the difference between a pine tree and a fir tree. The treatments there significantly reduced the proportion of fir trees and created better representation of the ideal pine to fir proportions that a healthier forest might have.

As the district’s forest fuels manager, Shackelford builds and promotes fire-adapted communities and Firewise sites across the district. The Carnelian Woods Townhomes Association was one of the first Firewise communities in North Tahoe’s district and that was one reason this location was selected for the treatment. “We want to benefit those that are helping themselves.” Another prompt for prioritizing the site are the fast winds that the North Tahoe location receives.

The area will continue to see mitigation attention. This project is surrounded by a larger 300-acre thinning project, which includes the California Tahoe Conservancy’s property adjacent. Piles on that property are planned for burning within the 2025-2026 window.

Toward the end of the site visit, Shackelford explained the nature of fire while shoveling snow off a burning pile. “If you don’t have oxygen, you don’t have a fire. If you don’t have fuel, you don’t have a fire and if you don’t have an ignition, you don’t have a fire.”

It’s these three elements that govern fire, and the manager explained, “There’s a lot that can be managed there, especially in the fuel part on how we can reduce the threat of catastrophic fire, get it to where fire is essentially beneficial, and keep the hope alive there.”

To stay informed on other burn projects in the Tahoe basin, visit tahoelivingwithfire.com.