Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
The grass curled when a torch set it alight.
Ash fell, fire freeing nutrients to the ground: a fertilizing gift to the next generation, as the last one gave to it.
Smoke rose under the September sun, turkey vultures circling.
The thatch crackled in the slow burn of 25 acres in a former hay field, being coaxed back into an oak savannah. Here, fire is a stewardship.
For thousands of years, that fire came from the hands of the Kalapuya at this very time of year, when the acorns fall from the Oregon white oaks.
A soft ignition. Low to the ground. Hot. Though, not hot enough to scorch soil.
In green and yellow gear, 36 people carried on that work in the north bottomlands at Mount Pisgah on the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 16.
They’re part of a partnership — called Rivers to Ridges — that has been returning the fire since the 1990s.
This network of local fire practitioners is turning to methods that Indigenous people used before they were removed from their homelands. Without it in the Willamette Valley, open habitats don’t last.
As Ed Alverson describes: “Prairie will turn into shrub or forest.”
Alverson has been connected to the partnership for decades. He’s the natural areas coordinator for Lane County Parks.
“You could think of the Kalapuya management as producing food, helping with hunting, materials for basketry, fiber, but also they were doing fuels reduction,” Alverson said.
Applying those ancient methods comes with a modern-day price tag and paperwork. Wednesday’s hour of burning will likely cost between $12,000 and $15,000. That funding comes from the 2022 parks levy and from grants from the Bureau of Land Management.
But if an unintentional ignition comes here one day, it should burn slowly, giving firefighters a chance to stop it from running wild. Potentially saving thousands of dollars, thousands of lives across the Willamette River in Springfield.
Wildflowers should bloom in the spring among the native grasses like blue wild rye growing from the burned ground. For now, they wait for the autumn rain in the blackened clearing.
