In July 2023, fire tore through the Cherry Creek Conservation Area. It raged for weeks until it was officially declared “out” in October, 2023 after having burned 46.4 square kilometers of land.
Wildlife fled. Several ʔaq̓am community members lost homes. The land was left in ash. If not for the BC Wildfire Service, far more of the irreplaceable would have been lost.
Three years on and crews are still there, restoring the land.
In just a few hours, a single fire destroyed decades of growth. Water couldn’t stop it in time. So what if the answer to fire is more fire?
You can’t stop wildfires from starting. But you can help change how they burn.
Join our email list to follow the crews doing this work — the thinning, the planning, and the careful return of fire — and be the first to know how you can keep BC alive and wild.
Long before it was such a threat, fire helped shape these forests.
For thousands of years, East Kootenay valley-bottom forests evolved with frequent, low-intensity fires — clearing out undergrowth and reducing tree density, keeping the forests open and healthy. The land knew how to take care of itself and its stewards encouraged that process.
Then we spent a century putting every fire out.
The cost of all that suppression is in plain sight. Forests choked with dense trees, heavy surface fuels, and ladder fuels that carry fire from the ground straight to the canopy.
All of this, combined with climate change, leads to fires that burn hotter and more destructively than ever before.
“Fire is part of these ecosystems, but after nearly a century of suppressing it, we have to be much more deliberate about where, when and how fire returns to the landscape.” says Chris Bosman, our Kootenay Conservation Land Manager.
“The long-term goal is to bring fire back in the right places, under the right conditions.”
So how do you bring fire back on purpose?
Prescribed and Indigenous-led cultural burning are among the most powerful tools there are for restoring fire-adapted ecosystems.
This isn’t a new idea. For centuries prior to colonization, First Nations have been practicing cultural burning on this land.
Reintroducing fire isn’t simple. It requires the right site, burn-unit boundaries, weather, conditions, funding, staffing/expertise, permits, and risk controls — all of which can take many years to align.
But prescribed and cultural burns are gaining ground. Guided by Indigenous firekeepers and First Nations, BC Wildfire Service and NTBC and many others are combining traditional knowledge with modern wildfire science to look towards slowly introducing fire to fight fire.
In the meantime, how do you protect a forest from the fire it once needed?
The solution, for now, is forest thinning.
Crews remove smaller trees by hand, thin larger trees mechanically, prune lower branches to reduce ladder fuels, and create wider spacing between the remaining trees.
Most of this happens in the dead of winter, ideally with frozen ground and snow, to reduce soil disturbance and site degradation. With the support of professional foresters, many of these tree thinning units are laid out in areas that form “logical burn units,” meaning that treatments prepare the land for burning at an appropriate intensity in future – maintaining and building on the accomplishments of the thinning phase.
It’s slow, unglamorous work. But every tree removed is fuel taken away from a fire that hasn’t started yet.
And the work doesn’t stop after the thinning. Grass seeding, road reclamation, slash pile management, invasive plant monitoring and follow-up treatment — crews work diligently year round to restore the land until it recovers.
With another intense fire season here, these patient, careful forest treatments could decide the fate of some of the Kootenays’ most irreplaceable landscapes.
Prevention is only half the strategy. NTBC staff have received basic wildfire training, and keep tools such as backpack water pumps, which have helped them respond quickly to small fires near conservation areas.
Michelle Daniel knows fire from the front lines — until 2020, she worked on BC Wildfire Initial Attack crews, the first responders who reach a blaze while it’s still small. Now, as NTBC’s Kootenay Conservation Land Coordinator, she fights it a different way: by getting ahead of it.
She’s mapped out ecological priorities across conservation lands, including grizzly bear corridors, elk habitat, Kokanee salmon spawning grounds and key bird migration routes.
All this information, complete with site-specific response details, is shared with BC Wildfire Service so that when fires hit, everyone is ready.
“Human safety will always come first,” says Michelle. “And while fire has an important role in the Kootenays, wildfires can also cause lasting damage to sensitive ecosystems. Proactively coordinating with the BC Wildfire Service means a win-win for ecological values, as well as for the safety of nearby communities.”
We gratefully acknowledge that our Vancouver office is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, who have been stewarding this land since time immemorial. Our work and conservation areas encompass many lands throughout the province, and we humbly acknowledge the First Nations communities who live on and steward these lands.
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Stay connected to the landscapes you help protect. Receive updates from the field, stories of conservation in action, and opportunities to support and experience BC’s natural places.