Hands-on training
Students work to reduce fire fuels in college forest class
Acrew of 14 Columbia College students began gathering before 8 a.m. Friday to gear up for forest fuels management class, a hands-on, learn-by-doing course rooted in the school’s beginnings 55 years ago.
The Forestry and Natural Resources program at Columbia, founded in 1968 — the school’s first year — by retired instructor Ross Carkeet, is as old as the college itself. Students who showed up for class Friday morning include young men and women who want to be firefighters, foresters, silviculturists, interpretive rangers, and at least one hopeful state fish and wildlife warden.
They confront the same problem most public and private property owners, tenants and residents face almost everywhere in the Mother Lode: They are in fire country, surrounded by vegetation that’s designed to burn, it’s growing and reproducing all the time, and if they don’t do something about it, the overgrown fuels they ignore could help fuel the next destructive fires that could kill people and destroy their communities.
Students who planned to work with chainsaws Friday morning put on chaps and some grabbed helmets fitted with visors and ear protection. Some filled metal drip torch canisters with fuel. Other students grabbed leather gloves to protect themselves from poison oak, thorns, and sharpened hand tools. It was cool and damp in the program yard, and chubby long-necked geese waddled near bleachers on a fenced ballfield close by.
Soon the students gathered in a circle around a pickup bed full of equipment and listened to their instructor, Tom Hofstra. They were headed to a brush-choked section of Columbia’s 285-acre campus near a spot called Spider Meadow, named for the burrowing trapdoor spiders found there.
They took a 30-pound first aid kit in a red backpack with them. The pack contains everything needed to treat paper cuts to chainsaw injuries. Because they work with sharpened cutting tools in the woods off unpaved roads on campus, they need to be prepared for any medical emergency.
Before 9 a.m., they were following Hofstra through an overhanging maze of manzanita, live oak, the evergreen shrub toyon, poison oak, buckbrush, ponderosa pine, and gray pine. Soon they were at work, sawyers with chainsaws growling, swampers spotting and gathering cut fuels, and taking turns raking up debris and using drip torches to get a brush pile burning.
Students working with chainsaws, machetes, loppers, rakehoes, pitchforks, and drop torches in Friday’s class included Jody Mcnair, 21, of Valley Springs; Cierra Torrez, 40, of Twain Harte; Orion Peck, 23, of Sonora; Levi Luke Kear, 19, of Sonora; Mekena Mendonca, 20, of Knights Ferry; Harley Radcliffe, 20, of Oakdale; Klayton Powell, 29, of Jamestown; Tyler Boudroux, 19, of Twain Harte; Carsten Sevier, 19,
of Soulsbyville; Curtis Schmittle, 19, of Sonora; Phil Thomas, 49, of Sonora; Maddie Pennell, 19, of Mi-wuk Village; and Paige Vidak and Stephanie Gonzalez, both of Sonora.
Ruby Mason, 23, of Sonora, is an assistant instructor on the fire fuels management class. On Friday, she worked on point as a sawyer in a brush-filled corridor with a Husqvarna 550 XP to clear brush and tree limbs, with students Boudreaux, Sevier and Schmittle backing her up.
Mason eventually wants to work in timber and forest management, perhaps for the Forest Service, and she says she was inspired by her experience in summer 2021 when she attended a natural resources field camp run by the Columbia College at the Baker Station High Sierra Institute off Highway 108 east of Dardanelle Resort.
“For a week we camped up there, learning how to use chainsaws, start burn piles, climb trees, treat vegetation, and local natural history and ecology,” Mason said, adding that it was “an amazing introduction into a field with so many possibilities” and “working outside with nature, I knew this was my calling.”
The more forestry classes Mason took, the more she fell in love with understanding and learning about the environment of the Central Sierra, the Stanislaus National Forest and the Mother Lode. She said she also fell in love with using a chainsaw.
Mason’s still studying, and she has taken almost all the Forestry and Natural Resources classes at Columbia, where she’s working on her general education courses.
Hoftra said he created the fire fuels management class in 2011 in response to growing fire risks and increased fuels loading on the Columbia College campus, which was happening up and down the Central Sierra and the rest of California.
“We started with hand saws and loppers and gradually worked up to chainsaws and now heavy equipment, an excavator and a track loader with masticator heads,” Hofstra said.
“Most of these students are not going to be working on hand crews very long after they graduate. Some do, but it’s important that they understand and appreciate what the work on the ground looks like and what it takes.” — Tom Hofstra, instructor, forest fuels management class
“Our typical treatment now is hand thinning and pile burning, or mechanical mastication, followed by broadcast burning. We chip sometimes when we can’t pile-burn.”
Since the program’s founding by Carkeet, Columbia graduates have helped fill the workforce that serves the Mother Lode and the rest of the Central Sierra, taking on careers with local, state, and federal government agencies, private businesses, and nonprofits including the Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Army Corp of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, California Fish and Wildlife, California State Parks, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the vegetation management firm ACRT, Tuolumne Utilities District, Sierra Pacific Industries, the Tuolumne River Trust, and the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center, Hofstra said this week.
“Most of these students are not going to be working on hand crews very long after they graduate,” Hofstra said. “Some do, but it’s important that they understand and appreciate what the work on the ground looks like and what it takes.”
Many students in the program will end up managing or supervising project work like the kind they have to do in fire fuels management class, Hofstra said, adding that he is a firm believer in leading by example.
“I won’t ask anyone to do anything I won’t do right next to them,” Hofstra said. “I want to instill that in my students. We’re not just teaching folks how to run a chainsaw or thin a forest, we’re teaching them how to work hard, as part of a team, to push each other, to pull one’s weight, to push through adversity and to persevere.”