Thank you Bob Williams for your excellent letter in the Bitterroot Star (Jan. 31, 2018), “Our 2018 Wildfire Season.” The heavy wet snowfall in the mountains and abundant spring rains will spell an abundant growth of grasses that
will become fire tinder along with the growth in the forests. Since cattle and sheep grazing and logging has been curtailed in the mountains and forests, we have become surrounded by potential wildfires.
I grew up in Eastern Washington State, and we always had hot dry summers that made putting up acres of dry timothy hay a sure thing. There were no forest fires that I remember in the Wenatchee Mountains because cattle and sheep were allowed to graze on the lush grasses, and logging was on-going in the forests. We experienced severe lightning storms in the summers.
In studying recent scientific data about our weather, it states that we could be on the verge of another ice age, as the activity of the sun is cooling down, not heating up. It has been proven by scientists that nothing man can do will increase or decrease the temperature of the earth.
But what we can do is eliminate the potential fires by managing properly what we have been gifted with. Continually locking up our lands and forests is not managing them, it is destroying them.
Sue McCreary
Stevensville