The Voice of Experience

The manager of the UBC research forest near Williams Lake says that after a summer of wildfires, he’s considering more frequent thinning of the forest to prevent such out-of-control fires in the future. When a fire started in the Alex Fraser research forest on the afternoon of July 7, 2017, Ken Day remembers looking out his window and seeing a stormy sky. Half an hour later, he said it looked like a volcano going off in the forest near the Williams Lake Indian Reserve.  …Day said the areas of the forest that had been thinned burned in a significantly different way “It got me thinking that maybe there’s an opportunity to manage our landscape differently if we do more thinning,” Day said. “If thinning becomes a component of our regular harvest practices, we could potentially make the landscape more fire resilient.”