The National Park Service has produced two excellent videos about fire management in Yosemite National Park in California. They are professional quality and rival any of the slick productions you see on broadcast television.
One is titled Best Intentions and gives an overall view of prescribed fire in the park. It is supposed to be 26 minutes long, but while watching it on the park’s web site it abruptly stopped at the 15 minute mark, in the middle of Fuels Specialist Mike Beasley’s interview, which is a shame because Mike is a former co-worker and I was looking forward to seeing his presentation. It is possible to download the entire 48 MB Quicktime video and watch it on your own computer, which would be a work-around for the 15-minute cutoff.
The other video is called Restoring a Meadow and is 7 minutes long. It is about removing non-native blackberry and the use of prescribed fire as one of the tools to accomplish that objective. The most interesting part of the video is how they ignite the prescribed fire without using any matches, fusees, accelerants, or drip torches.
