(hooves clopping) - [Narrator] Back in the summer of 2002, the field guide crew set out on a track into the heart of the Klamath Siskiyou Mountains.

(heavy breathing) We were after a story about the Upper Chetco River, a rarely visited gem, hidden within the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

It was late June and on the long hike in, we sense that this was shaping up to be an unusually dry summer.

- The river looks like it's pretty low right now.

I actually don't see any water in it (laughs) but we know there is, so we're gonna do this trip.

(air pumping) (water splashing) (screaming) - [Narrator] We put onto the river in inflatable kayaks and ran the 20 or so miles of the Upper Chetco in about four days.

(water splashing) We took our time and enjoyed the solitude and found welcome relief from the heat.

We had no idea then that this magnificent place would soon be transformed beyond recognition.

(water trickling) On July 13th, just two weeks after this video was shot, a lightning storm raged in the mountains.

(thunder rumbling) Forest Service Researcher Robyn Darbyshire remembers.

- There were five fires that started from a lightning storm and they're in fairly rugged country, very inaccessible.

And it can be very difficult for us, despite our best planning to get to these fires when they're very small.

- [Narrator] Southern Oregon was in the throws of a record heat wave.

Temperatures hovered near 100 degrees, perfect conditions for wildfire.

- This one spread so quickly and burned so hot in some places and move so fast, that it was really pretty threatening.

- [Narrator] At the time fires were raging throughout the Western states.

- (indistinct) let's go.

(helicopter whirling) - [Narrator] Fire crews were spread thin and the initially small flare ups in the Siskiyous were left to burn.

But the weather took a turn for the worse.

- [Man] Oh my God.

- We were having an end of shift meeting in the saw mill and looking out the window and watching this, watching this fire blow up.

And one day it blew up into, you know, I think, tens of thousand acres.

It was a huge blow up.

It looked like Mount St. Helens erupting.

The conditions were just right.

The winds, it was a hot summer and just everything seemed to line up for a huge devastating fire.

- And the temperatures spiked.

We got fire behavior that we've really never seen around this neck of the woods.

(fire raging) - [Man] Oh my God.

- Hey, hey boss, you see that?

Come here.

Hurry up.

- [Narrator] This video shot by Roseburg Water Tender, John Cranley was taken several weeks after the first fires erupted.

By this point in early August, things were growing tense.

Fire crews were now on the scene.

They were too late.

The fire was now burning out of control.

(gentle music) What became known as the Biscuit Fire complex was actually a convergence of several fires.

The Sourdough, the Biscuit, and the Florence.

This combined super fire raced through the Klamath Siskiyou Mountains, from east to west and from the Rogue River south all the way into California.

- At the time you felt like it was never gonna be put out.

It was just gonna burn through across the valley and up the other side, just felt like it was just gonna go forever.

- We all like to think we can control things and things like the Biscuit Fire teaches that we don't have quite as much ability to control them as we usually hope or think so.

- [Narrator] By the time rain snuffed out the last burning embers in November 2002, months after the fires began, nearly 500,000 acres had been charred.

It would go down as Oregon's largest fire on record.

We were lucky we were able to experience and record on tape, these scenes of the rugged beauty of the Kalmiopsis, just weeks before the fire.

We say lucky, because this is what we saw when we returned a year later.

- When we did our trip, a little over a year ago, we hiked in through those clouds, over on the other side of there, probably 20, 25 miles away.

And we walked a ridge for about seven miles that I've been told was completely burned, all the vegetation is burned off of it.

It was disappointing when it was burning because, I only got to work two weeks doing Chetco River trips.

And the Chetco River Canyon was completely full of smoke and large flakes of ash.

- [Narrator] Aerial photos reinforced what we privately feared, the Chetco River Canyon, a vibrant green paradise when we were there was now blackened.

- Yeah, the beautiful canyon.

Most of it, I'm sure it's fine, and there's gotta be some patches, but it grows back.

(chuckles) It grows back.

- [Narrator] The fires are now out, but the debate over what happened and what happens next is just heating up.

Link Phillippi, owner of the Rough and Ready Lumber Mill in Cave Junction, is one who doesn't believe this fire needed to happen.

- This was a catastrophe, this was a devastating fire.

It was a crown fire, it was huge.

I mean, this community was scared.

And you know, a lot of our employees live in this community it was a unnerving time.

I've never seen anything quite so big.

And, I mean, people really need to experience a big fire like this to really get the feel for how, you know, how bad it really is.

- [Narrator] Dominick DellaSala of the World Wildlife Fund, believes such emotion gets in the way of understanding what really took place.

- So this fire was not a catastrophe.

This fire played a very beneficial role in the ecosystem.

I think what we have to show people a year later after the burn, is that this is a very dynamic landscape, it's constantly changing.

And it changes the rule of what's driving the diversity of this place.

It's been happening for centuries.

- [Narrator] There is a contentious debate brewing about what the role of man should be in the forest.

Do we let fires burn or put them out?

(power saw roaring) Can logging be used to prevent fire or does it lay the groundwork for even bigger fires?

Should we thin the understory, the brush and the hardwoods, so fires won't burn so hot?

Shall we set small controlled fires in the spring and fall to prevent huge flare ups in late summer?

And what should we do with the burn forest in front of us today?

Should we salvage the timber for money or let it stand?

- There's a lot we don't know about how fire works, there's a lot we don't know about how plants respond to fires, how systems recover.

And if we don't understand that well enough, we could be making decisions to do certain things that could be very detrimental in the long run.

- [Narrator] This is not the first time Oregonians have had to make hard decisions in the wake of a massive wildfire.

The Tillamook Burn in Northwest Oregon offers a lesson in history.

- [Reporter] State forestry officials report yesterday's logging fire in Gales Creek Canyon near Forest Grove is now raged into a full-scale forest fire.

Apparently- - [Narrator] The toll of fire of 1933 took Oregonians by surprise.

- [Reporter] Gale forest eastern wind makes attempts to fight the fire suicidal.

The Gales- - [Narrator] The state was young and residents had little experience with big out-of-control wildfires.

- [Reporter] Working in the dry woods decided to haul in- - [Narrator] In the first 10 days of the Tillamook Fire, 40,000 acres of prime coastal timber went up in flames.

As in the Biscuit Fire, the best efforts of firefighters made little difference.

Tillamook was ready to burn.

When it was all over, nearly 300,000 acres, 13 billion board feet of timber had been reduced to ash and black and snags.

Oregon was dominated by a thriving timber industry and millions of dollars in product has just gone up in smoke.

It would have been hard to find anyone then who didn't view the Tillamook Fire as an utter disaster.

The Biscuit Fire offers us a chance to re-examine that basic assumption.

- For decades Smokey the Bear was the image of the Forest Service, that they use to justify their policy on every forest fire out by 10:00 AM.

And, you know, that's had a consequence.

- [Narrator] Dominick is spreading the message that fires, even large ones, are both natural and necessary.

On an unburned hillside in the Siskiyous, Dominick explains what's at stake when fire is not allowed to run its course.

- We're standing in a Darlingtonia fen.

And the thing that's going on with this fen, that's important with respect to fire is, the absence of fire.

There hasn't been a natural fire in this fen for a long time.

And because of that, the fen is starting to fill in with these shrubs.

And with the absence of fire, this wetland will succeed to a brush field and will lose a lot of the rare plants that really need to have fire to cleanse out that brush understory and allow them to exist in this wetland.

We have transformed these ecosystems in a very unhealthy way, through a century of suppression and logging effects that, you know, nature is now giving us a wake up call.

And that wake up call is that, the fires that we're seeing across the west are the result of a century of mismanaged forest landscapes.

- Link Phillippi argues that logging itself could have reduced the fire hazard in the Siskiyous.

- We've had fuel spill ups, the fuels have become so enormous.

Nothing's been done about it, it's just that we haven't been harvesting timber.

There's so much fuel out there, the possibilities for a huge fire was just enormous.

- [Narrator] If there's an upside to the Biscuit Fire, it's that the burn area has become a laboratory for fire science.

Prior to the fire, several hundred acres had been set aside as a research area to study forest management.

Test plots mimic clear cutting, thinning, controlled burning and everything in between.

(hammer banging) Trees were marked, measurements taken and data collected on everything, from how much wood was on the ground, to the size and age of every tree.

But when the Biscuit Fire marched through, scientists discovered that their carefully documented test plots had gone up in flame.

Crystal Raymond, a University of Washington grad student examines trees she identified just prior to the fire.

- This is an example of one of the aluminum tags that was attached to each of these trees, and it almost completely melted during the fire and fell off here.

Aluminum melts at about 600 degrees, and so we know that if the tags are gone, then it got at least that hot here.

- In some areas, the Biscuit Fire burned so hot and for so long, that roots of even the biggest trees were vaporized, leaving a web of tunnels in the earth.

In other areas like in this clear-cut, vegetation is coming back vigorously.

- All of these survive the fire and this we're talking, remember, we're talking about a fire that at this level was 660 degrees centigrade.

How these things could survive is remarkable.

These plants are so incredibly adapted to the disturbance that it's clear that this area has been burning repeatedly for them to develop those adaptations.

- [Narrator] In a landscape that looks like this, it's easy to believe that the whole forest was killed.

But new test can determine which trees are actually dead and which are still alive.

- Well, this reacts with an enzyme that's found in all living plant tissue, and it'll turn blue if it's alive and it will not if it's dead.

So the edge of that turned blue, so we know this is alive.

- [Narrator] This is called the Cambium test, and in future salvage operations, it can be used to make sure that what living trees are left aren't logged accidentally.

This was a huge and extensive fire, but not all study areas burned the same.

Test plots set up before the fire are revealing surprising new information about how common forest practices like thinning and controlled burning affect wildfire behavior.

Thinning, a type of selective logging is used to weed out dense thickets of young trees that have grown up as a result of decades of fire suppression.

(fire crackling) Controlled burning or under burning, reduces the overgrowth of grasses needles and brush.

Before the Biscuit Fire, some study areas were thinned.

Some more thin than then under burned.

Some were left alone.

Walking through the forest in the aftermath of the Biscuit Fire, Bernard saw that the fire's effects were different in each of the test plots.

- What I'm walking on is a fire line for the under burning study.

The area to my left was under burned in 2001, this area was not under burned.

They were both thinned exactly the same way.

So this is the dividing line, right here.

You can see there are some dead trees here, but many of them are alive and have branches even fairly low down.

On the other extreme, you see very few live trees at all.

It's hard not to conclude that the under burning treatment, at least in this particular spot was very effective at saving the entire forest from being killed by the fire.

- [Narrator] It was the burning of underbrush, more than the thinning of trees that seemed to make the difference.

At another test plots, Bernard sees signs that thinning trees may do more harm than good.

Thinning small trees that crowd the understory, the so-called ladder fuels, is supposed to keep wildfires from blowing up into the forest canopy.

But here in the Siskiyou study area, Bernard discovered the opposite.

- I think an interesting question here is the role that the hardwoods are playing in fire propagation.

Conventional wisdom is that these understory hardwoods act as a ladder fuel, that they propagate fire up to the crowns of the conifers.

But anecdotally here we see where, in this stand, many of the crowns actually survived the fire where these supposed ladder fuels were present.

In the other plot where they were removed, virtually all the canopy trees were killed.

We'll have to start asking new questions, like, did those hardwoods that are intermixed on thin stands somehow hinder the fire rather than accelerate the fire.

- [Narrator] These initial, but by no means definitive findings will add fuel to the ongoing fire debate.

Bernard is careful to note that what we see here is only anecdotal evidence and every forest, like every fire is different.

- We tend to extrapolate research findings inappropriately.

And policymakers like simple one-size-fits-all solutions.

The variety out here is immense, and this Western part of the Biscuit Fire is quite different from the Eastern part of the fire.

So management has to be done on a site-specific basis.

- [Narrator] Fireproofing this forest, at least in the near term is a moot point.

There's just not much left to burn.

The more pressing concern is whether logging companies should be allowed access to the millions of acres of dead trees that already blanket the Klamath Siskiyou Mountains.

- We're the last operation here in this county.

This industry's had a hard time.

Timber supply has been an issue for a long time.

Certainly it's dried up and a lot of mills have gone to the wayside.

But we feel that there's a need to have our operation here to produce, to provide jobs, to help, you know, support this valley economy.

- [Narrator] Mills like Rough and Ready in Cave Junction and the 75 or so employees that work there will benefit if they can salvage the dead timber.

But dead trees lose their value quickly as rot sets in.

And only the forest service can determine how many trees, if any, will be made available.

Before they decide they'll consider the ecological value of leaving dead timber standing.

- Well, I think the Siskiyou wild rivers area is much more valued for its incredible biological diversity for the nation as a whole, than it is as a series of two by fours with burnt needles.

- [Narrator] Dead trees provide nesting places for owls and woodpeckers.

And the decaying wood is habitat for insects, which in turn is food for birds.

Decomposing wood also releases nutrients into the soil.

Logging is already forbidden in the 280 square miles of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

But outside of that area, Link believes the forest should be opened up.

- I mean, the last 10 years has been a pretty heavily weighted towards, you know, protection and preservation.

I think a plenty of the woods are protected right now and that we need a pendulum to swing back a little bit more towards the middle.

The public lands need to contribute to their local economies and we certainly would benefit from that.

- [Narrator] Dominick worries that careless logging will leave the forest even more fire prone the next time.

- The big old trees were designed by nature to withstand fire, nature leaves the big trees behind, and it burns out the understory.

Loggers take out the big trees and they leave the understory.

And that's what the timber industry is not saying.

And they're not saying it because they want the economic value of the big trees.

They don't really care about thinning the small trees and the underbrush that don't have much in the way of economic value.

- [Narrator] After the Tillamook Fire, five to six thousand loggers earned their paycheck clearing out the charred forest.

Seven and a half billion board feet of timber were salvaged.

The coast range was then replanted with seedlings.

All this occurred without any great debate.

There are calls for caution today.

- A lot of those dead trees, especially the big ones are serving to anchor the soil.

A lot of the seedlings that are coming back are getting shaded out from the intense solar radiation, by those big dead trees, they perform a very vital role.

- We are like right here, basically.

- Or up there- - [Narrator] As research by Bernard and Crystal makes clear, the science of fire is not exact and studies often produce contradictory results.

Yet decisions need to be made.

- 9.4 and 10.0.

- They've been studying the forest to death.

I mean, nothing's been, they just study it.

I mean, the forest agencies do plenty of studies.

They're studying all the time, and little gets implemented on the ground.

I think we know what the right thing is.

I think that the right thing is that we salvage log, restore, we reduce fuels, we want to fireproof these forests so they remain forest that we can all enjoy.

(helicopter whirling) - [Narrator] In the wake of the Tillamook Fire, a massive salvage and replanting operation resulted in essentially a vast tree farm.

One that began producing timber as early as the 1980s.

But these tree plantations also lack diversity.

And many endangered species today struggle to survive in the Tillamook.

In the Siskiyous, there is a chance for balance.

Wilderness areas are set aside for nature to run its course, other areas will be open to study.

Still, others could provide an economic boost through salvage logging.

- I love the woods.

I, you know, love living in this community and what this fire did to a half million acres in this forest is terrible.

I just wish that the forest service agencies would get off their dime and get to moving and getting something done out there to get this forest back to the conditions that we all want.

- I think we recognize that we have limits, otherwise we'd be out there trying to control everything on the whole Siskiyou National Forest on every acre.

And we know that we can't do that.

It's too big of an area, forest is too complex and there's too many things that we don't know about it.

- [Narrator] One thing is certain, no matter how we decide to manage this forest in the future, it will burn again.

- Well, these forests have burned down and started over again, burned down and started over again numerous times.

And we've just never been around to experience that.

So it's kind of difficult for people to accept some of these changes.

- This is a set of knob cone pine cones.

It takes the heat of a fire to get the cone to open.

And if you look in here you can actually see some seeds.

It's very exciting for me because all of these processes are coming to light.

And I think actually the disturbance is an integral part of the systems around here.

It's not something that should never happen, it's something that's actually necessary.

(fire crackling) - [Narrator] There's no way we can stop fire.

What we need to do is figure out a way to coexist with fire.