Update: Controlled burns planned for Thursday are canceled.
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Alpine Forestry, an independent land management firm based in Summit County, has contracted with Park City to manage Treasure Hill, which sits above Main Street.
Alpine Forestry co-owner David Telian said, weather permitting, they plan to start burning on Treasure Hill Thursday.
“We’re going to give it a go… kind of on the upper part of the parcel and see how things are burning," Telian said. "It may go a few days, but we’re fast running out of time this spring to have good burn conditions.”
He said they use the remaining snowpack on the mountainside to their advantage.
“Here in the high elevation setting, we really target to be in areas that have a light amount of snow around," Telian said. "And we primarily use that to control the fire behavior of individual piles. But then also it limits the spread on the ground, as far as just fire carrying through the forest floor, so it really confines the fire to just the ring of that pile.”
Telian said there’s roughly 1,400 piles on Treasure Hill, and they plan to burn about 10% of those this spring. Work will continue in the fall, when summer temperatures begin to cool.
Annie Hazlehurst is an Old Town resident with a professional background in Earth science and biotechnology. She’s opposed to controlled burns because she says it will lead to the release of heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, into the air.
Hazlehurst said it’s especially a problem given Park City’s mining history.
“When Treasure Hill was purchased, the city did measure those levels, and they’re extremely elevated. Now, they didn’t directly measure the levels in the trees, but it’s not controversial that trees store huge amounts of heavy metals," she said.
"And when you chop them down and light them on fire, you’re going to release that back into the atmosphere.”
Telian said their work is an attempt to mimic Mother Nature.
“This is pretty normal across the West, that you make a trade-off to put some low quantity smoke in the air for a short duration to reduce that hazardous fuel," Telian said. "The flip side of that is, if we don’t do that, we’re at higher fire risk. And that could happen, say in the height of summer, and we can’t control it at all.”
If people see smoke over Treasure Hill the next several days, there’s no need to report it to authorities.
