Last year, wildfires burned 1.9 million acres in Oregon, setting a new record. Since 2020, major river drainages of the Cascades, including the McKenzie, Santiam, and Clackamas rivers, have been devastated by fires.

Many fear that it could be a matter of time before a catastrophic wildfire burns along the Highway 26 corridor on the west slope of Mount Hood.

Bracing for this potential, a small nonprofit organization based in Sandy, Oregon, is cutting trees and clearing brush.

Launched with funding from state and federal sources, AntFarm’s Community Wildfire Defense Program aims to address the growing threat of wildfires in rural Oregon communities, especially on Mount Hood, where the pockets of neighborhoods and businesses are hemmed along the edge of the 1.1 million acre Mt. Hood National Forest.

The program helps at-risk communities along the Highway 26 corridor create plans for wildfire defense, offers fire-risk assessments to property owners, and performs “boots on the ground” mitigation, such as fuel reduction.

The members of the AntFarm tree-cutting crew are at the front line of this work. Through brush clearing and cutting dead trees, they help reduce the amount of combustible material.

In the wooded neighborhoods where AntFarm has been working, trees are often close together, with dead branches interlocking like fingers. These branches can act like rungs of a ladder, allowing a fire on the ground to quickly climb into the canopy. When this happens, it triggers an inferno-like situation, what forest fighters call a crown fire, which burns hot and fast and often results in the greatest damage.

Falling the towering Douglas fir trees with chainsaws, as loggers do in clear-cuts, is dangerous work; in areas of tightly-packed homes, cutting trees has the added hazard of crashing down on a house or powerline.

So AntFarm crews have to scale these trees. They climb toward the top of a tree, cutting limbs as they go. Each time they are about to cut, they yell down, “headache!”

When they reach the height near the top, where the trunk is thinnest, the whole tree gently sways.

If it’s not safe to let the top of the tree fall on its own, crews must rig it with ropes so that, when the cut is made, it is caught and then slowly lowered.

AntFarm’s youth crew members are learning these skills as job training. Partnering with LeafcutterPNW, youth participants learn forestry and wildfire prevention techniques.

Working outdoors as a team, these young adults start by performing manual labor like bucking logs with chainsaws and loading cut limbs into a chipper. As they train, they can advance to tree climbing, and eventually the most technical and dangerous, topping trees. They learn safety systems for climbing.

This fire mitigation assistance is offered at no cost to low-income, elderly, and disabled residents in high-risk areas who are unable to accomplish this work on their own.

The program has treated over 100 properties and trained more than two dozen youth participants.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/15/wildfire-mitigation-preparation-antfarm-nonprofit-training-forest-management-tree-removal/