This article was submitted by the Mendocino Fire Safe Council. It has been edited for length by the Mendocino Voice.
MENDOCINO CO., 6/10/25 — The newly formed organization, the Round Valley Prescribed Burn Association, held its first burn on May 30, scorching 55 acres of grass at the airport just outside Covelo. Since grant funds became available from 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.
“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.” The August Complex burned over a million acres in 2020, chiefly in the Mendocino National Forest, scorching parts of six counties. It was started by 38 separate lightning strikes on the night of August 16-17.
A black area provides a safe space for evacuation during a wildfire. 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,” Hall 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 2000s, 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 said, is “bringing it back around.”
The kickoff burn turned into a large regional gathering of people and agencies. About 70 people from a wide variety of firefighting and nonprofit agencies converged from around the county, as well as from 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 nonprofit organization led by retired U.S. Forest Service burn bosses who lend their expertise to smaller entities. Terry Warlick, a former battalion chief in Covelo, went to work with his old colleague Scot Steinbring, who co-founded Torchbearr and is now 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.”
Before the main event, it was the old Army adage: Hurry up and wait. Then there was some more waiting, as people monitoring the weather reported on the temperature, humidity, and wind conditions.
Every fire has a different set of conditions under which it’s safe to start burning. On this day, no one could light a drip torch until it was below 80 degrees, with a wind speed under 10 miles an hour. May 30 provided a foretaste of summer, with dry heat lingering at 94 degrees until well after 6 p.m.
“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.”
Residents across California know that a bad day is when a wildfire gets out of control and tears through a community. In 2020, 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.
Jewelina Acosta, a member of the Ukiah-based Yokayo Tribe of Indians, met Steinbring when they were both working for the Karuk tribe. She first got involved with prescribed fire for a burn’s 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 said.
Picking the day to burn controls the outcome
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 fence line 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 working with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council, described how the flames were being deployed, less than 15 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. 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 the 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 on 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 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.”
The fire subsided. It was time for a late dinner. The people of Round Valley have made a refuge from future fire, on a patch of blackened ground.