Each month we will feature a “Profile in Compassion” from a firewood bank to share inspiring stories of bank leaders, volunteers, or firewood recipients. This month we feature Mike Mayernik, Stewardship Coordinator for Swan Valley Connections in Condon, Montana. Please feel free to suggest the next one!
What is your occupation and background/relation within the community?
I am the Stewardship Coordinator for Swan Valley Connections, which is a conservation and education non-profit located in Condon, MT. We have many different programs at Swan Valley Connections ranging from assisting private landowners with wildlife coexistence to living in a fire adapted ecosystem but my primary role is assisting private landowners in securing grant funding to support wildfire risk reduction projects. This might include forest thinning, selective logging, chipping, mulching, etc. to reduce forest fuels and reduce wildfire risk to communities in the Swan Valley.
What is your connection to firewood banks?
Swan Valley Connections has been doing an annual Community Firewood Day each fall for about 24 years. Originally the community firewood day was a part of one of our college accredited field courses at the time called Landscapes and Livelihoods. College students from around the country would come to the Swan Valley and through SVC learn about the challenges of living and working in a forested place with a diversity of wildlife and a very rural setting. Community Firewood day was an opportunity to interact with people in the community to collectively work to distribute wood to people in need in the valley while also learning about what it is like to live and work in a rural forested place. Before I started working for Swan Valley Connections I would volunteer for the day as I knew people that worked for SVC. Now that I work for SVC one of my roles is to coordinate the Community Firewood Day in things like securing wood, inviting volunteers, and maintaining a list of people that are in need or use firewood for heat in the Swan.
Do you see a role for firewood banks in forest management?
Yes. A few times SVC has worked with landowners and were donated log truck loads of wood for of our Community Firewood Day from wood removed during selective thinning wildfire risk reduction projects. Our firewood day and community is relatively small so a load or two of logs goes a long ways. The forests in the west are fire adapted forests many of which have evolved with regular low severity fires from lightning or indigenous peoples that burned through and removed small trees and debris while much of the larger trees survived. With current agency fire management actions of successfully suppressing 99% of all wildfires those natural fires are not occurring as they historically did. There is such a need for forest thinning and removing excess wood and forest fuel in our forests in the west that has accumulated due to that fire suppression for about the last 100+ years. I think firewood banks could be good avenues for a use of wood that might not be of quality good enough for houselogs or sawlogs for dimensional lumber etc. The challenge I think would be paying for the transportation of getting the possibly lower value wood to the wood banks.
What motivates the work you do with stewardship and conservation?
I want to contribute to leaving the forests of the Swan Valley in a better condition than it is now. Some of the past management actions have had unintended negative consequences like introductions of noxious weeds or past logging that removed all the big old trees and now are replaced by thickets of small trees instead. We can take actions now like responsible forest thinning and management that can set the forest on a trajectory that is more resilient to threats such as a changing climate and increased wildfire risk. With care I think this can be done while still maintaining the wildness and diversity of wildlife that inhabit this place.
What do you find the most satisfying about the work you are doing?
I meet with a lot of landowners that just want to do the right thing for their forest and reduce the wildfire risk but they don't really know where to start. It is satisfying to help them find a contractor, develop a plan, complete a fire risk reduction project, and see the whole process from start to finish.
What is the hardest or most frustrating?
Maintaining a steady flow of grants and funding to help landowners is a challenge. I want to be able to help landowners that ask for help when they ask but finding the funding and writing the grants and being successful can be difficult.
What is your favorite story related to the work you do?
One example that comes to mind is recently this spring I had a site visit with an older private landowner here in the Swan Valley. They were worried about wildfire, had been working for years cleaning up debris and small trees to reduce fuels, but were feeling overwhelmed with the amount of work and that it was too much. I walked the property with him and the property was very thick and like a jungle with small grand firs you could hardly walk through the property. The landowner had never been to parts of the property as it was so thick and he did not know where his property boundary in some places actually was due to the density of the trees. With the help of my GPS mapping I was able to find the property corners and old boundary markers and re-flagged the property boundaries as the landowner tromped through the woods with me. Once this was done the landowner later found a contractor he liked, got a bid, and SVC secured grant funding to help with the removal of the excess small trees and forest fuels and reduce the fire risk. A few weeks later the contractor with the use of a skid-steer mounted masticator (forest chipper/mulcher) worked through the property and masticated the majority of the small grand firs choking and creating a fire risk for the other trees like Western larch and Ponderosa pine as well as reducing the fire risk around the house. Walking through the project afterwards was extremely rewarding as the landowner was excited to be able to actually walk and move through his property. Also, the forest fuels and fire risk were reduced to a level that was more manageable for the landowner to maintain into the future. One last thing the landowner asked of the contractor before he left was if he would cut down a couple of sickly looking Douglas firs for him as they were too tall and too much for the landowner to do himself. The contractor gladly safely dropped the trees and the landowner planned to limb them up himself and was happy for the future firewood that those trees would provide for his wood stack.
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