Pat and Judy McKelvey worked with NRCS to make the forestland on their property south of Helena, Mont., healthier and less prone to wildfire. Read about their work in the Working Together for Healthy, Fire-Safe Forestland ArcGIS Story Map. Find a text-only version of the story below.
Watch their story in the Conservation for the Future: A Montana Video Series.
High resolution photos of Pat and Judy McKelvey's property south of Helena, Mont., in Jefferson County.
Pat McKelvey has worked in fire mitigation for many years and has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the field. In fact, he earned the 2018 National Wildfire Mitigation Award for his work in Broadwater, Jefferson, and Lewis and Clark counties helping residents prepare their homes and properties for wildfire season. When Pat and his wife Judy purchased 100 acres of timbered hills south of Helena, Mont., they saw both an opportunity and a retirement project.
“This is a great piece of property just south of Helena, very rural. We acquired it about four years ago and it was not in the same kind of condition that you are looking at right now,” said Pat McKelvey.
When the McKelveys bought the property, the forest was not in good shape. There had been some logging done that left high stumps, down timber, and even a broken-down skidder. More devastating to the area was the mountain pine beetle infestation.
“It moved through here in 2009-2012 in a very, very heavy way. And we had 80% mortality in the lodgepole and in the ponderosa pine. We were aware of that of course and what that meant from a fuels perspective and from a forest health issue,” said Pat.
Trees killed by mountain pine beetles had passed through the red phase of standing, dying trees with dry, red needles to the gray phase. In the gray phase, trees have lost their needles and begin to deteriorate. This is the stage the McKelveys came onto the scene. The beetle-killed trees had begun to fall and were stacking up, 10-12 feet deep in some areas.
“In this lodgepole and Douglas fir type area that we’re in, boy you get something going in that, that’s a fire that’s going to resist suppression activities like you can’t believe. Plus, it’s going to just wipe out everything in a soil component,” said Pat.
The McKelveys weren’t only concerned about a fire on their property, but also worried about their neighbors. The scenery, recreational opportunities, and rural lifestyle have attracted many homeowners to the forests south of Helena.
“The wildland urban interface is around us 360 degrees. We’re sitting in what looks like a pretty rural, non-built out environment, but there are homes all through this country,” said Pat. “Since I’m somewhat familiar with fire behavior and the way that has an impact on the wildland urban interface around us, we wanted to achieve a lower intensity of the expected fire behavior. We needed to generate some income and then we needed it to have it in a condition, you know forest health condition, where we can hand that down for generations.”
So, Pat and Judy went to work. Their intentions were to improve the forest health and decrease the potential for devastating wildfires on the property on their own.
“This was going to be our plan in our retirement. You know, sell a few logs and send them to the mill. I’ve got a tractor, and a saw and oh boy. Well we would still be back there by the gate if it was us doing it alone.” said Pat.
Unfortunately, Pat was injured while working. He suffered a severed quadriceps tendon that put him out of the action.
“It became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to do this on our own, that we needed the help, that we needed a contractor, that we needed some planning. And that’s how we got into it with the NRCS,” said Pat. “The NRCS EQIP program was familiar to me, because of what I was doing then in my civilian job. And the opportunity came up with the Joint Chiefs Initiative it’s called. And I applied for it as a customer of the NRCS. That prompted a couple of great folks to come out and take a look at it.”
Conservationists in the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) field office in Whitehall, Mont., helped the McKelveys by assessing the forest resource, developing a plan based on their goals, and providing financial assistance for the implementation. The Joint Chiefs’ initiative is a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service and the NRCS to bridge the gap in forest management between publicly- and privately-managed forestlands. Financial assistance for the initiative comes from the NRCS Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).
“The McKelveys’ goal was fuel mitigation. There were a lot of beetle-killed, dead and down trees and trees growing very close together which is ladder fuel for fire to travel both from crown to crown and along the ground,” said Nancy Sweeney, NRCS district conservationist in Whitehall. “It was a high priority to protect neighbors and the property boundary bordering Forest Service land.”
“The application process started to look a little more daunting than I had hoped for, but it really wasn’t once you got into it. I think it was the way that it was presented and put us, that put my wife and I both at ease when we started to fill that out,” said Pat.
The NRCS specifications for the project required spacing between trees that would diminish the likelihood of a crown fire and cleaning up dead and down trees and other debris to decrease the intensity of ground fire.
“We had to achieve that minimum 20 feet crown-to-crown spacing and as you went up in slope then you got to 30 feet and as I recall when you got to the boundary with our neighbor the Forest Service, the forestland, then we had to widen that even more to, I believe, 40 feet if it had any kind of a slope component,” said Pat.
The thinning project produced a lot of slash piles that had to be cleaned up. The McKelveys took on this work rather than paying the contractor to do it. They spent two winters burning close to 800 piles. Many of those piles have now been reseeded.
“It’s a much more fire safe property and a much more aesthetically beautiful property,” said Judy McKelvey.
Judy and Pat are still working to control weeds on the property. Although they did not inventory weeds before the thinning work was done, they have seen increased populations. The McKelvey’s said that if they had pre-treated the weed infestations before the logging equipment went through, the weeds might not have spread as much.
“One of my big jobs is weed control. They will take over and our goal is to keep them contained, not totally eliminated because that’s just not possible,” said Judy. “They take the forage away from if you wanted to use it for grazing for cattle, for an instance, as well as elk, the deer, the moose and those animals are up here, and we want to see them remain here. If the forage is gone, they are going to be gone too.”
“We don’t believe in tying things up and not having use. But we do believe that that use has to be in a proper fashion, that we are only temporary stewards here. We want to make our next decisions on what our grandkids probably are going to have to live with in this because it’s our intent that this stays in the family now for several generations,” said Pat.
