Moments in Time with Dave Van Cleve: GIS Saved Coyote Canyon
David Van Cleve has many ties to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Anza-Borrego Foundation. In the 1980s, he was an environmental scientist in the San Diego regional office, where he collaborated with park staff on many significant natural resource projects. In 1989, he was selected to serve as the superintendent of the state park. In 1994, his responsibilities were expanded to include management of six other state parks (Mt. San Jacinto, Cuyamaca Rancho, Palomar Mountain, Salton Sea, Picacho, and Indio Hills) in addition to Anza-Borrego. After retiring from state service, he worked for The Nature Conservancy as Ecoregional Director for the South Coast Ecoregion and added over 1,000 acres to the park. Each month, Dave will fill in some important issues in the history Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, which often dove-tail with the history of ABF. We are grateful for his wealth of knowledge of the Park and willingness to share with us!
The District’s Geographic Information System (GIS) “Saved” Coyote Canyon.
The Pines Fire; July – August 2002
Beginning in the 1990s, a few California state parks began using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to help manage them. GIS is a computer program that can layer different types of information. In the early years, local planners were often cited as examples of how GIS can be a valuable planning tool.
Let’s say you’re a planner for the state park system, and your assignment is to develop a map for Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in advance of the preparation of the Park’s General Plan. The Park is an oddly shaped 650,000 acres. Some features are already in place – roads, trails, buildings, campgrounds, picnic areas, and parking lots, for example.
Administrators in Sacramento have told you that because of the Park’s proximity to urban areas and freeways, its natural beauty, its mountainous terrain, and, rarely for Southern California, its pine and black oak forests, it is a very popular Park. At the same time, the Park is renowned for its incredible natural and cultural resources – rare plants, stands of sugar pines (John Muir’s favorite tree species), mountain meadows, running streams, and numerous archaeological sites.
So, your job is to come up with a rough draft map of where popular facilities could go. The state parks director makes it clear that she wants more campsites, especially those camping with their horses, built in the Park.
GIS consists of individual layers of information – rare plants, soils, archaeological sites, slope, and land-use restrictions (such as designated wilderness and cultural preserves). And it allows you, the planner, to “work backwards.” How does this work?
You tell the computer you want it to show you where a new horse campground could go. Of course, it needs accurate and complete information to begin with. You add a layer of the entire park map showing all known rare plants and their habitats, another map of land slope, and another for known archaeological sites. Then you tell the computer to combine all these layers and produce a map of all possible sites for a campground – no rare plants, no wet meadows, no cultural sites, no sacred sites, quiet areas, minimal slope, stable soils, no wilderness conflicts, no infringement on “dark skies” or “Quiet parks” goals. Once the unacceptable regions are eliminated, you are left with appropriate possibilities.
In 1995, the newly formed Colorado Desert District, the umbrella district that included Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, hired its first GIS specialist. It was really good timing, since the Park was beginning to prepare the Park’s resource inventory – a database of all the natural, cultural, and paleontological resources in this immense Park. All this data was loaded onto GIS layers. Without the impetus and funding for the General Plan, researching and entering resource data for the entire Park would have taken many years.
What we did not anticipate was that the GIS system and its manager, L. Louise Jee, would be able to save Coyote Canyon from the 60,000-acre Pines Fire of 2002. Jee would partner with the Park’s airplane pilot, Jon Muench, to save the canyon, not actually from the fire itself, but the actions proposed to suppress the fire and stifle its spread.
In late July of that year, a government helicopter accidentally started the fire. The helicopter was operating in Banner Canyon, just east of Julian, California. As with many summer fires in Southern California, the weather was hot, arid, and windy, and the brushy fuels were dry. The fire was immediately out of control and started moving north and west.
The fire suppression agencies set up their Incident Command (IC) Center on Wynola Road, between Santa Ysabel and Julian. ICs for a major fire are impressive. They hauled in temporary cell phone towers, a kitchen, hundreds of tents, gas pumps, and water trucks to keep the dust down – and that was where hundreds of firefighters lived the life of the fire. Entrepreneurs even set up a portable silk-screening operation in a van and were making and selling t-shirts with a picture of a helicopter on the back, surrounded by flames.
On day three of the fire, the Incident Commander told me of their plan to head off the fire along the northern route, which was now moving northward along the ridges on the west side of the Park. They were afraid that, once it crossed Coyote Creek, it would race unabated towards populated areas in eastern Riverside County. Just curious, boss, how are you going to “head off the fire?”
“We’ve sent three bulldozers to the bottom of Coyote Canyon. They’re going to go up the canyon, side by side, and cut a fire line the width of six dozer blades.”
Yikes! Coyote Canyon is one of the loveliest and resource-rich parts of Anza-Borrego. Coyote Creek is a perennial stream that supports a riparian corridor of lush vegetation, rare and endangered bird species, watering and lambing areas for bighorn sheep and other wildlife, and tons of important archeological and historic sites. Not to mention enormous boulders.
I asked him if he would give me some time to convince him that the fire would never reach Coyote Canyon, much less communities north of it. “The fire will be going downhill, into very light fuels, and likely against the wind by that time,” I told him. I threw in a few buzz phrases in a desperate attempt to convince him I was familiar with fire behavior principles. He was nice enough to call his staff together. “How long before the fire gets to Coyote Canyon?” he asked. “About four hours,” was the answer. He told me I had two hours to convince him.
I called the park office (thank God for those temporary cell towers), spoke to L.Louise Jee, the park GIS specialist, and told her to get hold of the park pilot, Jon Muench. Jon fired up the park airplane, which barely had room for L.Louise, her camera, and her GIS laptop in the back seat. Jon’s task was to fly over the route the fire was likely to take. L.Louise took photographs and marked the geolocation of each photo on a map. She was able to record slope and vegetation type – vital to this effort.
They landed and uploaded the map files to an FTP site at the IC.
The IC took a look and immediately agreed with me. “That fire will never burn that far.” That was the good news. The bad news was that the bulldozers were pulling into Borrego Springs, and the IC could not reach them on their cell phones.
I raced to the end of the paved road at the bottom of Coyote Canyon and was able to head off the dozer operators. I have never been a fan of rank insignia for park rangers, but I am convinced that my collar brass (okay, maybe my sidearm) was convincing that day. I felt a little bit like the Tank Man at Tiananmen Square.
At the state park staff debriefing, we shared some humor about one of our seasonal staff, Scott Martin, who was on the fire line helping to cut a fire break. After his shift, Scott drove back to the IC campground in Wynola and got in line for dinner. The kitchen was in a trailer, and diners walked by a window when an arm came out, holding a beef burrito with rice and beans. Scott, a vegetarian, asked for the veggie plate. The arm went back in, and came out a few seconds later with the burrito removed—just rice and beans. Lesson learned: don’t order veggies at the fire camp.
My boss in Sacramento had been nagging me for years about the GIS we had invested in. “Tell me one time when it has actually been valuable. You are wasting money and staff time, Van Cleve.” The GIS role in saving Coyote Canyon was invaluable, as was Jon and L.Louise’s rapid response. GIS has proven its worth, especially in facilitating resource inventory and the General Plan for the entire Park.
There was a rumor, never substantiated, that one of the bulldozer operators was observed digging a hole 6’x6’x3′ as I was trying to convince them to turn around…
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