Smoke is normal - for 1800s (California fire ecology)

No one in Colfax or Auburn will breathe a whit easier knowing this, but the heavy wildfire smoke that gave their towns a carbon black eye on the Air Quality Index on Monday is historically the norm for the foothills, studies show.

Analysis of tree rings and oral histories of American Indians and Euro-American surveyors suggests that the cobalt blue skies typifying the Sierra today were more the exception up through the 19th century. The skies likely were smoky much of the summer and fall in the mountains and other remote and parched regions of California, where fires were largely ignored.

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The scientists estimated that an average 4.4 million acres burned annually in California before 1800, compared with an average 250,000 acres a year in the last five decades, 1950 through 2000.

That's nearly as much land as wildfire consumed in the entire United States during a whole decade, 1994-2004, which fire officials deemed "extreme," said the study, which was published last year in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

http://www.sacbee.com/378/story/1066675.html

Cough.

fires set by American Indians. They found that burning tree areas type-converted the land into grasslands - preferred by deer, part of their diet.

Am currently reading a book on this topic, and too many repeated fires can completely type change the habitat - eg from chaparral to grassland. This type-change allowed invaders to take hold when Europeans arrived, resulting in almost all non-native grasslands in CA.

... so we don't get the big ones.

It would be nice to know what California was like when it was managed by Native American populations. Maybe there could be "fire days" when everyone lit off the brush around their homes and villages so that the fires would all converge away from structures.