BY SHERI McWHIRTER
GRAYLING -- Signs of a massive wildfire that ripped through Crawford County and burned dangerously close to Grayling are easily found: charred tree trunks, blackened forest floors and three houses burned to the ground.
Three weeks ago, 1,345 acres of jack pine and hardwood stands burned in a wind-whipped fire believed to have been ignited by a passing train. Now the community is adding up the costs and preparing for the next time spring winds roar through the tinder-dry jack pines.
Some locals, like Jason Hall, recall April 24 as a normal day in the small northern Michigan community.
Hall ate dinner with his wife and three children at a Grayling pizzeria and had no inkling their home in the Karen Woods subdivision sat in the fire's path.
"As we were coming home, they were evacuating the neighborhood," Hall said. "It was pretty scary. Smoke was blowing this way and it was thick and really stinky."
Firefighters allowed the family to gather their two cats and dog before fleeing the area. They were terrified of losing their house, but glad to retreat, Hall said.
Falling embers
Elsewhere, fire skirted within about 50 yards of the Ramada Inn, Grayling's largest hotel.
"There were burning embers falling in the parking lot," said general manager Dean Smith. Sparks set aflame landscaping beneath the hotel's entrance sign.
Employees evacuated upwards of 100 guests, many having just arrived for a three-day conference at the hotel. Meanwhile, firefighters built a fire break trench across the wooded hotel property, of which 15 acres burned.
"They saved us," Smith said. "It could have been half the town with just a little shift in the wind direction, easily."
The Cross Country Ski Shop sits behind the hotel, even closer to danger. Fire break trenches scar the ground, and the surrounding forest still reeks of charred wood, owner Dick Fultz said.
On the back side of the blaze, employees at ADJ Forest Products, one of the town's bigger companies, hustled to protect the business.
They used bulldozers and front-end loaders to push sandy soil into berms between the factory and the fire, which back-burned toward them in a wall of 5-foot-tall flames.
Water-filled cement mixers were used to douse the ground before the fire arrived, said Dave Stephenson, ADJ president.
"I was more concerned about the fire burning toward town. That's right where it was heading and it was like a freight train picking up speed," he said.
High winds pushed the flames northwest, where it jumped Interstate 75, burned just along the southwest edge of town and into a swamp. It burned to Simpson Lake and tributary creeks of the Au Sable River, where the fire sputtered in marshy wetlands before it could reach a large residential neighborhood.
Lessons learned
Dr. John Sloan and his wife, Nancy, planned ahead and saved their house.
They live in a log cabin in the Grayling Game Club, where three nearby homes now lay in ashes.
"It was very peaceful that day, until the fire got here," John Sloan said.
The retired couple from Chicago worked in their yard as usual. And all their raking and tidying kept the house from going up in smoke.
"For the last three years, we've basically cleaned everything around to make it look like a park," Nancy Sloan said.
Tree limbs are trimmed to at least six feet from the ground and leaves and sticks are cleared away for dozens of yards around the residence. The work was done for aesthetics; fire protection was a bonus.
"And we turned our sprinklers on, which is just common sense," Nancy Sloan said.
"It doesn't take a lot of effort by homeowners to protect their homes in a forested area," said Larry Allwardt, the area's fire supervisor for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Mowing the lawn, raking leaves, trimming branches and thinning pines near buildings are all suggested fire protection activities, especially in fire-prone jack pine forests, Allwardt said.
"The ones that don't usually are the ones that burn down," he said.
State officials hope the April 24-25 fire will reinforce the need for better fire prevention techniques around area homes. Free public workshops are being planned in Grayling to teach residents how best to protect their property, Allwardt said.
Environmental impact
For all the property loss, anxiety and taxpayer cost, April's fire likely will provide a long-term benefit for the local jack pine ecosystem. In fact, it's biologically necessary.
Green grass and ferns are beginning to poke out of the blackened forest floor and environmental officials expect natural regeneration in much of the fire zone.
"A couple of days after the fire, it was just raining jack pine seeds," said Susan Thiel, DNR Grayling unit manager.
Intense heat is required to open jack pine cones and release the seeds. With the recent rainfall, seedlings should begin to grow, Thiel said.
Replanting efforts on the 570 acres of state land that burned will be decided after surveys of the area through the summer and autumn.
"I think we're better off ecologically to be patient and see how things go this summer," Thiel said.
Burned oak stands are expected to recover, with many trees likely to survive. Stump sprouting also will happen, Thiel said.
The large wildfire essentially will "reset the cycle for the forest," said David Rothstein, associate professor of forest ecology at Michigan State University.
"All those standing dead trees can be important for insects and cavity-nesting birds -- woodpeckers in particular," he said.
Burned jack pine stands will re-grow and be ideal habitat for the endangered Kirtland's warbler in about six years, while torched blueberry bushes will generate great fruit this season, Rothstein said.
