Sedona may be getting fire breaks on the south side during the next decade as the U.S. Forest Service considers additional fire management approaches for the Red Rock Ranger District. RRRD District Ranger Alex Schlueter first announced the district’s plans to investigate and potentially introduce fire breaks during a priority update to the Sedona City Council on Dec. 10.

“Internally we call it the Big Park protection plan,” Schlueter said on Jan. 14, although the plan covers a much larger area than the Big Park and Village of Oak Creek area alone, and said that its development was “in its early stages.”

“We’ve known for the course of my time here that we weren’t progressively working on community protection,” said district Fire Management Officer Travis Mabery, who has been with the district since 2000. “As time has gone by, our ability in the agency to use the science side of the house has really caught up and given us some great opportunities … to determine what those threats are to communities.”

Mabery said that the breaks might vary in width from 100 to 200 feet if and when they are built, depending on the local topography and vegetation and modeling of potential fires under summer weather conditions.

“The steeper, the wider, generally,” Schlueter said.

“In a fire, we want to make sure that it’s wide enough, one, not only to create that fuel break between the values, between the structures or powerlines or whatever, and the fire itself, but that fuel break itself isn’t necessarily alone going to stop the fire,” Mabery said. “We need to get firefighters in there as well. It needs to be wide enough that folks can basically stand in there and hold the line, be present, be ready for fire to come down off the hill, and not be somewhere that it’s still so hot as the fire approaches that they can’t work in that area.”

“Some of the areas where there’s a thicker fuel component, maybe some of the juniper and brush, that could be a little bit wider treatment so that we have an adequate buffer,” Mabery continued. “Then there’s areas where it’s lighter fuels, maybe a grass component, where we don’t need a bigger cut. In that toolbox it could be everything from actual hand cutting, the thinning of some of those fuels, to mechanical, using mastication to come in and basically grind or chop that material down.”

“With the predominant winds coming from the south and southwest, we’re really looking at the south side mainly,” Schlueter said. “Based on expertise and based on historical patterns, I think that’s the one we can really say for sure.”

“During our core fire season in the Southwest, we’re under predominant southwest wind flow,” Mabery said. “When you look at treatments around Flagstaff, treatments around Prescott, treatments around Payson, a lot of it occurs on those windward sides of those communities, cause that’s the highest probability of a fire. That being said, though, we had the Committee Fire two summers ago, I believe, we’ve had multiple other fires up on Munds and Lee Mountain that are lightning starts, and then we’re dealing with downflow winds … we all have to be cognizant of that and continue to plan to provide the community protection for those sides even though that’s probably the abnormal fire that we would have.”

“It really comes down to putting our resources where we think they’ll have the best impact,” Schlueter said. “We can’t have treatments everywhere on every square foot, so when we look at those models and do the math, figure out where we’re going to have the best bang for our buck.”

One open question is the effectiveness of fire breaks, given that fire can spread via embers in high winds.

“It gives us a place to at least start,” Mabery said. “Instead of us having to move right into the community and right into what we call structure defense, if we have a line in the sand to work off, we can divvy the cards on a lot of fires, per se. Maybe it gets us an opportunity to get in there and do some burning before the fire gets there and create that buffer. If we don’t have those fuel breaks in, we’re already behind the eight-ball.”

Mabery also noted that historically, the Sedona and VOC area experienced more frequent but less intense fires prior to the USFS’ adoption of a policy to suppress all fires in the first half of the 20th century.

“We’ve helped create this problem that we’re trying to come back out of in some regards now,” Mabery said. “Prior to the Brins Fire in 2006 … for fire occurrence in the Sedona and Village of Oak Creek area, there’s nothing really large that is recorded … Going back through historical, prehistoric times, these were fire-dependent ecosystems that probably burned very regularly across this landscape. That’s why we see the density or the incursion of the juniper component.

“A lot of this historically would have been grasslands. A lot of pictures from the Village of Oak Creek from the ’40s and ’50s, looking north on what’s now 179, that was all open features between the red rock, and now it’s just a sea of juniper component. Our evidence tells us that it burned regularly and didn’t allow for the encroachment of the woody species.”

In November 2024, Coconino National Forest supervisor Aaron Mayfield set a goal of selling at least 14.5 million cubic feet of timber annually for the next three years in order to reduce wildfire risk, an amount of biomass representing enough energy to power around 22,700 homes, based on EPA estimates of residential energy consumption.

“The Red Rock Ranger District has significantly less involvement in those types of projects than the other two districts in the Coconino National Forest simply because we have significantly less mature trees and large trees that have value like that,” Schleuter said with regard to timber sales. “It’s a lot easier to have a merchantable timber sale when you’ve got black walnut trees than when you’ve got ponderosa pine trees, and even easier with ponderosa pine trees than say juniper. You have more volume, it can be used for more products.”

He noted, however, that the Coconino National Forest ranks fourth among national forests in the volume of timber offered for sale and agreed that future potential exists for overlap between timber sales and building fire breaks.

“Whatever material is removed from any project we have, we’re going to be creative about trying to find a positive, productive use for that material,” Schlueter said. “For example, we’ve got Wood for Life, it’s a program that started a few years back in this forest and has since expanded to multiple forests, and it’s when we have products available that a lot of times might just be piled up and burned … we actually provide those to local tribes, or tribes that have connections to this area, and then they are able to distribute it to tribal members to heat their homes. Typically that’s the main use.”

“Some of our neighboring forests have gone down this road … to power some of the cement plants or power plants,” Mabery said. “The idea might have just outpaced the infrastructure that was in place at the time. The cost to move the material at that point just wasn’t as viable as initially thought, but I know there’s some other avenues potentially out there that would allow for some of that biomass removal. There’s some new processes out there, maybe cut some of those costs and get those as being viable options again.”

“If it can be used more productively, that’s a win-win for everybody,” Schlueter said. “We don’t have any of that lined up or planned for this project, we’re nowhere near that stage of it, but when we get down the road of planning and have a proposed action … that’s when we’re going to be thinking, okay, what partners would be interested in this, how can we use this to some benefit beyond just the agency.”

The planning road the district must travel will be subject to staffing capacity and other considerations such as completion of an environmental analysis, although Schlueter expressed optimism about the district’s current staffing levels.

“Before implementation, at least two years; more like three years or even four before on the ground something like this would happen,” Schlueter said. “It’s a long process that many people would be interested in.”