Ed Krumpe Interview, Part Three Item Info
Topics:
Jack Kredell:What stays with you when you leave? Taylor?
Ed Krumpe:What stays with you when you leave Taylor? I think what stays with you is you have a new appreciation of the grandeur and size of this wild landscape. I mean, people see the word wilderness on a map and they maybe have done some backpacks and, you know, a ten or 15 mile backpack. And that's still big country. But this is big, wild country.
There's a major trail down Big Creek. And boy, that's about it. And they will probably have seen wildlife and signs of wildlife or some carcasses from either a wolf or cougar kill. So I really think that when people come out, they they have a new appreciation for that. The grander and the remoteness of these uninhabited places. And we have a legal designation for that is called wilderness place man as a visitor doesn't remain and places are untrammeled, which means uncontrolled by man.
I mean, the biggest change in my career of going into there for 40 some years has been the fires and fires a natural part of the wilderness landscape. But had been suppressed for many years. And so when we did have the fires of 2000, they were huge. I mean, they were 100,000 acre conflagrations. And so places that I remember hiking in dense dug for forests are now barren.
I mean, there's still black stems standing from 2000 fanning that long. But the neat thing is, it's coming back. It's coming back slow as you fly over. You see a patchwork quilt of different shades of green. And that's called the natural vegetation mosaic. And that's where fires have since 2000, fires have spotted in small lightning fires. And they burn for a while and then they hit new growth, which is has more moisture and red and it's lower.
And it drops. And so now we're starting to get that pattern back. And that's what supports wildlife, too. But it's a huge change. A huge a huge change has been the the effect, I think more than 50% of that wilderness has burned since 2000. That's a lot a lot of far. But it's kind of recycling things back there to get into better condition.
Jack Kredell:That was a lot of fuel that ... to it
Ed Krumpe:It was unbelievable when the when the fire came through Taylor, Jim and Holly Akenson the managers rode out and headed downstream. They got to the Middle Fork and there were some people rafting that had stopped on the Middle Fork. And so they fed them and put them up. And then they went on upstream about I can't remember 11 miles or so to the Flying B and the fire spotted ahead head and came over there like two weeks later.
And there were a commercial plane and a private plane flying over that country at the time that that fire team came in. And our manager was there helping to protect that place. And it had an air to ground radio and the lookout, the Forest Service lookout on the south side of that Middle Fork said, holy cow, there's a fire of biblical proportions coming in.
I'm out of here. So our people heard that. And then it did come in and it created a firestorm where it's so hot and so much fire that branches and everything are being sucked up and it reignites the carbon in the flame and it goes even higher. So the commercial airline pilot was talking to a private pilot and they were at 32,000 feet and saying the smoke column is going above us.
And then they said no one could survive that conflagration. And our manager was helping defend his ranch and she had an underground radio. Just wait a minute! Wait a minute! There are people down here. We're fighting the fire. We're still here, which was important. They got word out and then, yeah, finally we're able to send people in. But that that those fires were, you know, every bit as big and hot as the ones you see now in California.
Just 30,000 foot smoke columns. That's a big fire. But now we get to study that and get to study how it comes back. And yeah, there's a lot a lot to look at. It's caused landslides and all kinds of things, but it's coming back.
Jack Kredell:You mentioned how the environment has changed so much and you seem to almost expressed how you you felt a sense of loss perhaps, and nostalgia for this stuff for for for the burn. But you also you're also fine with it And that it's it's a it's a part of the natural fire cycle.
Ed Krumpe:Well, it is a part of the natural fire cycle. And to see it up close. But it was shocking. I mean so when we would hike from from Taylor Wilderness Research Station up to Big Creek I mean up to our Cabin Creek, which is a Forest Service landing field that was little over seven miles. We would hike.
And I would say that 70% of that was in the shade of trees. And in fact, your legs would be wet because of the grass and the dew, because you usually start hiking in the morning. Now, 90% of that right out in the sun and there's a big old burnt snags and things like that. I mean, that's that's pretty major.
And Pioneer comes down through Taylor Ranch and that's about a 90,000 acre watershed. It's a basin and I can't remember how high, but close to 9 to 10000 feet high behind it. And more than 90% of that whole watershed that was completely covered with forest burnt. And so our big fear was that with big rainstorms and stuff, there's trees are gone.
That's just going to come sliding down. I mean, there could be huge mass wasting events where you'd have a wall of water and debris and stuff coming down. So we contacted the USGS and they've had people that have studied this process and they flew in some scientists and experts that looked at the area and surveyed it. And for quite a few years after the fire, every cabin and tent had an aerosol can with a boat horn on it.
And the instructions to every group that came in was if there's a really bad thunder burst up in the high country, this could come washing down. And if you ever hear that, you just you don't try to go to the cookhouse. You don't try to you just go any way to get uphill out of out of that little valley and you blast that horn.
And so this this was a serious concern. In fact, you know, we were really wondering, should we chance even bringing students in? But we didn't have big storms for a couple of years. We had some big storms and it would flow dirty, but it wasn't we weren't getting landslides. So I can't remember how many years, but maybe four or five years later.
The USGS came back in and they went up and were looking at it and they said, we've never seen anything like this. They had seen huge mass wasting events after forest fires over on the Oregon coast and Northern California. But here it wasn't occurring and the reason was there was so little soil, So so the trees weren't on thick topsoil or any kind.
The trees were growing in Boulder fields and rocks. And so it's it's true that after about 7 to 9 years, those trees would start to fall and the roots would start to decay. But they weren't. But it wasn't. They weren't holding soil. And so we kept monitoring that. Pretty soon I don't think you could find a boat horn in there anymore, but more for about 5 to 7 years we had we were concerned and worried about it, but it also was they just found that fascinating that you could have that large of a drainage with so little soil that had supported this fairly old growth, primarily Doug Fir Forest.
Jack Kredell:So yeah, things like that. You just, you just don't know. You don't expect it until quote happens.
Something similar did happen not too far away that formed Roosevelt Lake. Right. So there are the theories imply that that that creek.
Ed Krumpe:Or there's been many you know, places that this kind of thing has happened, but that that has been remarkably stable. I mean, I don't fear it now. I mean, you have some amazing cloudburst and you have some flooding. The other thing, though, that it pointed out and we never thought about this. Pioneer Creek is there and it's always been there.
And it's a wonderful jewel we have all these years we've been drinking the water out of Pioneer Creek with no need for any kind of treatment. We didn't get Giardia. We didn't get anything for 70 some years. Nobody caught anything from drinking that water. And so you think of that as a totally stable stream. But when the geologist from USGS, when they said, well, you realize this stream has been at two primary different locations and possibly three, and you really saw this great big sloping meadow where we harvested our hay and stuff.
Pioneer creeks on one side. Well, on the other side, there's forest, but there's definitely a valley, and that's where it used to flow. So it has jumped back and forth. And in fact, what we call this beautiful hayfield and meadow is outward. It's outward from 95,000 acres behind us. But it was in geologic time that it was be on one side and be on the other.
And the one lady said, you know, someday you're going to have a big event and it's going to be going down there again. And we never crossed our mind that that that that huge I think 20 acres or so was deposited from our wash and that the stream itself had moved back and forth in geologic time. That was fun to experience.
Jack Kredell:That's so interesting because we tend to romanticize wilderness as this unchanging place. When in reality it's a it's a very dynamic.
Ed Krumpe:Whole, constantly changing. So the other huge effect that I have witnessed in, well, since 1979 and it's now 2022 when I first went in for a number of decades, there was almost no cheatgrass. In fact, I was with a forest ecologist and he said, See, on these kind of sagebrush, a bunch blue bunchgrass hillsides that you see, there's a couple of big old trees and you see that kind of like yellow something underneath.
He said. That's that's, that's dead grass. And because of the moisture that the trees do, that's cheatgrass. But he said that's not a good thing. That stuff can spread, spread out. It's it's pernicious. It's all through the area and it's just a major, major hazard hazard has almost no nutritional value for any kind of stalker, bighorn sheep or deer or anything.
It's it's an invasive from Asia. It comes up before anything else germinates and it germinates soon and and it's very thin that the grass is just really fine, fine, thin. And so it germinates and dies and so then it becomes dead and able to carry fire. And it's able to carry fire right about the time that the native grasses are coming up and influencing and being pollinated and and spreading seed and stuff.
So now we have across the West these massive cheatgrass fires that go ripping through. And it's not just that they burn, but that they they kill and suppress the native grasses. And so we just have cheatgrass everywhere. There up and down those drainages. And when I first started going in there, very little of it. And that's that's a huge change.
And then we have had, you know, there's always been an invasion of noxious weeds in along some of the trails. We now we first everyone said it's backpackers with their ... soles that are no it, it's in the drainages, it comes in from birds, it comes in on the hair of elk and deer and stuff and they, there's been some programs, the Forest Service has done some eradication programs to try to try to control it.
But the spot in that weed is, is really a pernicious problem. And then there is some rust skeleton, which is also pretty bad. So we and then cheatgrass and fire, those are invasive species, are they how do you say this, that they can tolerate harsher conditions so they often come in after disturbance, they're a disturbance related species. And so things that have thorns and can grow other places kind of come in to replace stuff.
And so I've seen a lot of change that way too. And and so there's less for wildlife, less for people with stock That's that that's as big and pervasive in many ways as the fires been.
Jack Kredell:Yeah. Which suggests that as remote as wilderness is that it's still connected with the rest of the globe.
Ed Krumpe:Yeah. You can't totally get away from it. Years ago, I'd have to look up the date. We got contacted by Idaho National Engineering Lab, and they'd. I was at a conference. They were doing Idaho Falls or somewhere, and they were talking about they had these air quality monitoring stations in one of the most pristine air sheds on earth where Titan, Antarctica, Patagonia, the Ural Mountains in Russia.
And some of the most pristine air sheds where hopefully there would be zero anthropogenic smoke, smog or anything picked up. And I said to them after the presentation, I said, Well, what about Frank Church? And they said, you can't do that. They said, It's for service wilderness and you have to have this tripod and you have to have solar panels and stuff like that to do the sampling and it has to be checked regularly year round.
And I said, We can do that. And I said, What? So they was and this was this is the early eighties. This is like $125,000 apparatus. They brought in and set this up and I mean it had a full methylation meteorological station and barometric pressure and all recorded on a data logger but it had this air quality sampling.
It had these these ceramic discs. So they were they were sucking air in to get the finest particulates measurable by man. And we're talking microns and then.
So they were they were sucking air in to get the finest particulates measurable by man. And we're talking microns. And then there was only two places in the nation we could send these. And I think Stanford had a place to test for, for this. And I think the other might have been MIT, but our stuff was sent to Stanford.
But, you know, I thought, Wow, that's amazing. We have this air shed that's so far from any industry or anything that's great. We have this clean air shed. And I started to think about why do they want to monitor these pristine clean air sheds? Well, the reason they wanted to monitor is they wanted to be able to verify that the nuclear armament treaties, because it would pick up any, you know, strontium 90 or anything, it was floating around of somebody violating this.
So, so nasty war actually funded the project that went on for quite a few years. But it is I mean, think about it. Where can you ever get a breath of clean air? They told me that probably the last breath of clean air on Earth was in the early 1950s in the Antarctic because from drilling core samples, ice below that, absolutely no anthropogenic contaminants after that, nuclear ions and stuff starts to show up.
So, yeah, I mean, it's big, but it's still impacted by the outside world.
Jack Kredell:The great I didn't know that about the last breath of clean air. I suppose you could also melt the ice core and inhale some of that well.
Ed Krumpe:So the other thing that has been done there is there has been one or two studies where they came in and it's called paleo archeology, where they take core samples of the silt at the bottom of these high mountain lakes and seasonally you have striations just like tree rings where you have different flows and spring and you have more things stirred up.
But from that you have pollen that settles out. And so from these mud cores are going back hundreds going back thousands of years. They can track the climate, climatic conditions because there's a climatic conditions change the tree species and stuff suddenly change. And so there has been documented that there's been roughly a three to 400 year cycle of colder periods, followed by three or 400 years of warmer periods.
And students can actually see this when they hike down from the facility down Big Creek. There are places that there are some monster -- I mean, we're talking four foot diameter ponderosa pine and almost right beside them be we would size Douglas fir. Now those who do not grow in the same conditions, Ponderosa pine, you know needs lots of sunlight they're where the Doug fir is a shade tolerant and so how would you have something that needs hot dry conditions to grow like a pine and Doug fir that needs wet, cool, shady conditions?
Well, the answer is, is it probably one was at the start of one of those periods and the other came in as a period was changing. And so that's that's something to see that they can just walk right by it on the trail.
Jack Kredell:Wow. That's pretty amazing.
How are you surviving with the flies? See the they're all attracted to this or that. That's great. It might be doing you, sir. maybe quickly. So you've got your your Ph.D. in 79, right.
Ed Krumpe:With 7879. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, totally. It probably shows the 79.
Jack Kredell:And then in.
Ed Krumpe:At Colorado State University. Yeah, I.
Jack Kredell:Think 1980,
Ed Krumpe:While I was here in 79, in the spring semester.
Jack Kredell:Okay then. So the following year, this region that Taylor sits in went from that primitive area right to the Frank Church river of no return wilderness, right. Did that entail any, any changes in how the land was managed or.
Ed Krumpe:that's a great question because there was a lot of contention about that. There are public hearings and the dean asked me to go present in Greenville, and it was at this huge, huge meeting room, and I was probably the only person there didn't have a cowboy hat on. But, you know, I talked to them about the advantages of wilderness, and that's one person asked me, well, how much more do we need?
And I said, That's not the question. There is no more. There will only be less wilderness. So we need to take care of what we've got. And because it's there won't be more, it's a matter of how much less can we can we stand? And so they grudgingly nodded and smiled. But not a lot of change other than the Forest Service when it became wilderness.
Then there is some additional regulation and things that we had to adhere to, or they were concerned about where we causing an impact and stuff. But but not a not a great change.
- Title:
- Ed Krumpe Interview, Part Three
- Creator:
- Jack Kredell
- Date Created:
- May 24, 2022
- Description:
- Jack Kredell interviews Ed Krumpe, a retired professor from the University of Idaho College of Natural Resources. In part one, Ed discusses about his work at the Taylor Wilderness Research Station from 1979, the geography of the area. In part two, Ed discusses how his time at the research station stayed with him, the impact of the '00 fires, and other changes in the area.
- Subjects:
- Big Creek wilderness wildfires
- Location:
- Moscow, Idaho
- Latitude:
- 46.7324
- Longitude:
- -117.0002
- Source:
- Voices of Taylor - Jack Kredell Interview Project funded by the U of I Library and the College of Natural Resources
- Type:
- Image;MovingImage
- Format:
- video/mp4
- Preferred Citation:
- "Ed Krumpe Interview, Part Three", Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive, University of Idaho Library Digital Initiatives
- Reference Link:
- https://www.lib.uidaho.edu/digital/taylor-archive/items/krumpe_3.html
- Rights:
- In Copyright. Educational Use only. Educational use includes non-commercial use of text and images in materials for teaching and research purposes. Digital reproduction permissions assigned by University of Idaho Library. For more information, please contact University of Idaho Library Special Collections and Archives Department at libspec@uidaho.edu.