Playing with Fire: Living in a Pinyon-Juniper Forest
By Gary Hubbell, ALC
United Country Colorado Brokers
There is a singular beauty in the sweep of a pinyon-juniper woodland—gnarled trunks twisting against a brilliant blue sky, the spicy scent of sun-warmed needles, and the quiet company of songbirds at dawn. Yet, beneath this tranquil veneer lurks a volatile truth: fire is a constant companion, shaping both the landscape and the lives of those who choose to dwell within its reach. It’s common to see real estate listings extolling the advantages of living in a pinyon-juniper forest.
100 million acres of pinyon-juniper “PJ” forest across the West
Anyone who has spent time in the West knows how dry the landscape can be. As I write this from my ranch in Crawford, Colorado, the humidity is 25%, it has rained a grand total of an inch in the past two months, and there are well over 100,000 acres that have been recently charred by wildfires within a 100-mile radius. A great percentage of those burned acres have been pinyon-juniper forests, or what the locals call “the PJ”. Typically found at lower elevations—between 4,500 and 7,500 feet—in very dry climates, the pinyon-juniper matrix is a forest of two-needle pinyon pine and any of several different varieties of juniper trees, with western juniper a predominant species. Annual precipitation in pinyon-juniper forests averages anywhere from 7” to 25” a year. These trees are extremely well adapted for drought and do a good job of capturing whatever water happens to fall from the sky, whether rain, snow, or hail. Both pinyons and juniper trees reach around the same height, rarely more than 30-40 feet, but trunks can be thick and stout, up to 30” in diameter.
Pine nuts, wildlife habitat, firewood, fence posts—pinyon-juniper forests have their place
Don’t get me wrong, PJ forests play an important role in the Western landscape. Many Southwest tribes such as the Navajo, Utes, and Hopi Indians gather savory pine nuts from pinyon pine cones. They are delectable. Big game species, particularly mule deer and to a lesser extent, elk, favor dense PJ forests as bedding habitat, where they can go bed down in the shade and then emerge to graze in open meadows at dawn and dusk. Straight juniper trunks make excellent fence posts, and both species make good firewood.
A Western tinderbox—pinyon-juniper forests are highly flammable
My father, an experienced woodsman, taught me as a boy to look to the trunks of pinyon trees to gather pitch and add some bark from a juniper tree to start a fire. Interestingly enough, porcupines like to eat pinyon bark, and the pitch will bubble up where the bark has been stripped off. Drop a chunk of that, add some juniper bark, strike a match and it will soon be blazing merrily. Juniper has a feathery bark that is also very flammable. Both are dense woods. Pinyon has a high content of pitch, has a lot of knots, and is not suitable at all for lumber. Juniper is a very hard wood that makes excellent fence posts. Sometimes juniper is used for decorative Western-styled furniture. Growth rings are often very, very close together and a tree trunk 12 inches in diameter might be 400 years old. While it burns very well, both pinyon and juniper are more difficult to harvest than most firewood species. The pitch from pinyon and the feathery bark and hard wood of the juniper tend to dull chainsaws quickly and they’re hard on equipment. Both pinyon pine and juniper have the highest fuel content of almost any firewood at 27 million BTU’s per cord. Only a couple of eastern hardwoods have more BTU’s than pinyon pine and juniper. Aspen and spruce, found at higher elevations, have only 14.7 million BTU’s and 12 million BTU’s per cord, respectively. Many pinyon-juniper forests are very dense and thick, with a canopy that covers much of the landscape. Combine that with dead trunks, pine cones, and broken branches on the ground, and it’s a conflagration waiting to happen.
Many decades of fire suppression have resulted in huge fuel loads
There is very little browse or grazing in most pinyon-juniper forests, and consequently no one ever homesteaded much of it. A large percentage of PJ forests are on public land, much of it administered by the Bureau of Land Management. While some PJ forests have been logged for juniper fence posts and pinyon firewood, many PJ forests have never been touched. For the most part, government agencies have conducted a strict no-burn fire suppression policy on many Western lands, which caused a slowly creeping expansion of PJ forests across sagebrush meadows and open lands. In previous millennia, lightning strikes and burning by native Americans tended to keep the PJ forests in check. However, in the past century, forests have expanded to the point that the fuel load of pinyon-juniper forests has become extreme. Even government agencies who should know better have recently made losing bets on being able to control fires in PJ landscapes. The National Park Service let a fire on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon get out of control, which resulted in the loss of the famous Grand Canyon Lodge.
The rural real estate interface—civilization encroaches into dry Western landscapes
Land has become more and more valuable as towns and cities have encroached into areas that were previously regarded as undesirable. While most everyone wants an irrigated acreage, irrigated land can sell for 3-4 times what a neighboring dry property might bring. As far back as the 1970’s, developers put the keen eye on pinyon-juniper forests as the next source of inventory and punched roads and utilities into the PJ to build houses. Back then, fire danger was not something that many professionals regarded as important, and in some places, it still is the case. After all, that forest has been there for hundreds of years, so what’s the big deal? So goes the logic, and truly, those properties may be just fine for another couple hundred years. I show property to lots of buyers, and often they’ll ask me about a property that I know is in a pinyon-juniper forest. I may be much more negative than most brokers and agents, but my answer is this: “I wouldn’t even spend the night there,” I’ll tell my buyers. “Pinyon-juniper forests are an extreme fire danger.” My perspective is colored by an event that I witnessed when I was a teenager. A plume of smoke puffed up from the side of a mesa across the valley from my childhood home in Carbondale, Colorado. This steep hillside was 500 feet vertical and covered with a PJ forest. The puff of smoke almost instantly grew into bright orange flames, and the fire burst into a wall of flames probably 40 feet high and climbed the hillside of 500 vertical feet in about 15 seconds. As a real estate professional, I’d rather tell you the truth about a property and not make a sale, than sell you a property that ultimately kills you and your animals.
“Fire tornadoes” and “fire whorls” are extremely dangerous and threatening
As I was writing this article, I was interrupted by a phone call about breeding one of my Lab females. I asked the owner of the stud dog about his “real job,” aside from breeding and training Labs. “I’m a fire mitigation specialist with the Bureau of Land Management,” he said. “Perfect!” I exclaimed. “You’re just the guy I want to talk to!” I asked him whether he would live on a property in a PJ forest. “No way,” he said. “It’s just too dangerous.” I asked what he considered to be a safe defensible space. “Probably a mile,” he said. “Really?” I asked skeptically. “Really,” he said. “It’s because of the spotting caused by pinyon-juniper fires. The heat is so intense because of the high fuel load that it can cause ‘fire whorls’ or ‘fire tornadoes’ that can be as much as a mile in diameter. This is a whirling cloud of embers, sparks, ash, and smoke that can deposit embers or sparks a wide distance away from the actual fire—as much as a mile. That’s why these fires are so hard to contain.” I pondered this for a moment, realizing that the Lee Fire just west of Meeker had jumped Highway 13 from the west side to the east side, and Highway 13 is significantly wider than most two-lane highways at that point. That blaze actually threatened a ranch that we sold just west of Meeker, even though the ranch has half a mile of irrigated hayfields between the ranch headquarters and the fire. Our new owners are fine, but they had some really anxious moments. In six short days, that fire has now grown to 89,000 acres with 0% containment, and most of it was pinyon-juniper forest.
Have you changed your mind about living in a pinyon-juniper forest?
Now that you know all this, do you still want to build your dream home in a pinyon-juniper forest? Do you want to buy one? I recently had a buyer inquiry on a property that I know is in a particularly thick PJ forest. “You don’t want to live there,” I said, and explained why. My buyers agreed. Landowners with pinyon-juniper forests on their properties need to not only think about their defensible spaces and forestry practices, but neighboring lands as well. If your property borders BLM lands and they’re doing a lousy job of managing their lands, you may have to plan accordingly. In an absolute worst-case scenario, what could happen? Is there only one route out of danger? What about horses, dogs, and livestock? Is the truck and trailer ready to roll? Are haystacks and barns vulnerable to spotting from fire whorls? Where is the closest water supply? Do you have a “go bag”? Do you have a gun safe rated to 1,200 degrees for your guns and documents? Finally, can you even get insurance for your home in the pinyon-juniper forest? Just some things to think about. Call me if you’d like some advice.
Gary Hubbell, ALC, is an Accredited Land Consultant and member of the Realtors Land Institute. A native of Carbondale, Colorado, Gary has hunted, hiked, cut firewood, jeeped, and ridden horses over wide expanses of Colorado lands. He has brokered properties all across Western Colorado and Utah, including farms, ranches, hunting land, orchards & vineyards, and luxury homes. A professional writer and photographer, Gary has been published in many magazines, newspapers, and websites. He raises Labrador retrievers and grass-alfalfa horse hay on his Crawford, CO ranch with his wife Doris.
