by Tony Jones
Images by Courtney Perry
“Fire is a force of destruction, but also a symbol of rebirth and renewal.”
-Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire
The burn plan application that we filed with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) Forestry Division was anything but poetic. It began, “The parcel to be burned is a 5+ acre unit of mature hardwood with a few mature conifer (little to no conifer regeneration) with a small food plot included. It is a very nice woodlot stocked with large oaks and some basswood and maple besides the few large conifer with the usual understory of hazel, willow and buckthorn.”
The email I got back from the MDNR forester approving our permit concluded with a link in which I sensed a hint of resignation: “Good luck with the buckthorn.” I get it. Buckthorn is a scourge in Central Minnesota where my family owns 276 acres of land that my grandfather bought out of tax forfeiture in 1964.
I’ve written in Covers before about my family’s attempts to manage our land (BRITNEY: PLEASE ADD TITLE AND ISSUE OF 2021 ARTICLE), about how a tornado in 1973 mowed down the majority of our majestic white and red pines. In their place, grew aspen, the opportunist of northern forests. Now, five decades on, those aspen have peaked and we’ve begun to log sections of the land, sending the wood to a paper mill in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, to be pulped for paper.
The buckthorn is a new twist – and an aggressive competitor to native species. In the last decade, the invasive, noxious weed has migrated into our woods from neighboring properties where it grows unchecked, choking out native flowers, grasses, forbs and young trees. My brother and I have cut it, pulled it and sprayed it with herbicide, but we’ve been losing the battle.
My friend, Timo Rova, suggested that we try a prescribed burn on a small patch of woodland as an experiment of sorts. Timo is a master of fire: having worked for the U.S. Forest Service for decades as a smoke jumper, his retirement gig includes writing burn plans and supervising prescribed fires.
It took a bit of convincing by me to get my family on board. Lighting the woods on fire does sound counterintuitive. On the drive from our homes in the Twin Cities to our land in Crow Wing County, we pass various iterations of Smokey the Bear warning us against forest fires. But we had the support of Troy Holcomb, our forester at the MDNR, which helped us overcome Smokey’s propaganda.
After talking about it for a few months, everyone was on board.
Ancient Fire
Surely, our land has burned before in eons past. Our cabin sits atop an esker, formed in an outwash plain as the Rainy Lobe of the Laurentide ice sheet was receding north 50,000 years ago. On one side of that esker sits Eagle Lake and, on the other side, a 40-acre wetland. From the wetland rise bluffs on which majestic pines once grew. Cycles of fire and regrowth marked this land, both before and during its habitation by Native Americans.
As we considered burning it ourselves, I thought of the relationship that ancient people had with fire. The Romans told stories of their hero, Prometheus, who stole fire from the hearth of the gods on Mount Olympus and delivered it to humankind. He was condemned by Zeus to eternal torment for his transgression, but his gift of fire sparked the origin of human culture and society.
Around the same time, across the Mediterranean Sea, the Israelites were singing psalms about the Lord’s use of fire:
You make the clouds your chariot,
you ride on the wings of the wind,
you make the winds your messengers,
fire and flame your ministers.
The Lord himself was experienced by the people as a pillar of fire, leading them through the wilderness on their 40-year sojourn toward the Promised Land.
Another ancient religion, Zoroastrianism, was so enamored of fire that they fashioned all of their rituals around it; the mythic founder, Zoroaster, considered fire the primary image of God and told his followers to keep a flame burning and never let it go out.
The ancients had an intimate relationship with fire. They feared it, of course, for its destructive power, its ability to outstrip their ability to contain it. But they also hallowed it, using it for their sacrifices, cooking the parasites out of their food and warming themselves so that they could inhabit otherwise inhospitable climates. Anthropologists tell us that Native Americans burned prairies and forests to revivify berries and herbs, to clear land for farming and to move large game animals as part of their hunts.
The Prep
I was both nervous and skeptical about setting our land alight. Timo visited the property twice – once with me and once when he was passing by on his way to another burn – and he assured me that the spot he’d chosen would be ideal for a novice: an area of about three acres with natural boundaries on three sides (a county road, a UTV trail and a neighbor’s driveway), meaning I would only have to cut a fire break along the remaining boundary.
He asked me to email him some maps of the property and he and I exchanged onX waypoints. He explained that oak leaf litter makes for excellent fuel; the leaves curl when they dry, so air flows around the leaves and they burn hotter (maple and aspen leaves, on the other hand, lie flat, trapping moisture) plus we had dry pine needles littering the forest floor. These would be the fuel for the fire.
He also kept my expectations in check, telling me that it would take several burns to really mitigate the buckthorn. A spring burn would damage the buckthorn, maybe even top-killing them if we got it hot enough. Subsequent burns would be later – in the early summer to damage the plants’ rhizomes and roots just after they’d spent all their energy putting out buds. Troy, our MDNR forester agreed, telling me, “Completing a prescribed burn like yours is always a dance. You want to wait until later in the season so green-up is progressing and more objectives are met, but you also have to be flexible and take the ‘window’ (weather and fuels conditions) that’s given to you.”
Timo put it more bluntly. “A spring fire is a good beginner fire, so you can learn how it’s done.”
The next step was getting approval to burn from MDNR. To do that, we didn’t sing psalms or tell tales, we filled out a form. Timo wrote the plan, Troy proofed it and I submitted it. It contained descriptions of the property, our fuel model (“dormant brush and hardwood litter”) and the native plant community (“wet mesic prairie, central dry oak, aspen, pine”). We had to specify the window of wind, humidity and rainfall in which we would burn plus what fire suppression tools we’d have on hand.
I could go on, but suffice it to say that I couldn’t have written the burn plan myself – I definitely relied on Timo’s expertise. What I could do was notify the neighbors that we were going to burn and also call the 911 dispatch center in our county so that they wouldn’t send fire trucks when the smoke was spotted. I made those calls and I rounded up a couple friends to help. We were ready to burn.
The Burn
On April 26, 2025, I got up and turkey hunted for a couple hours. Timo texted: he was walking out of the turkey woods himself. He’d be at our place at 2 p.m. He wanted me to get the other guys together, along with drinking water, our UTV, rakes, the drip torch I’d borrowed and the five-gallon backpack fire pump I’d purchased, full of water.
He led us in a safety talk and started a group text thread for communication. Then he split us up – I’d be on a drip torch, followed by Steve with a rake. Timo would be on the other drip torch, followed by Christopher with the backpack pump. We checked the wind. It was out of the north, so we started in the southwest corner. We’d burn into the wind, another counterintuitive aspect of this process. However, once I saw it in action, it made perfect sense because the fire moved more slowly – and was more controlled – with the wind as a buffer.
To hold a metal can full of two-thirds diesel and one-third gas and light the end of it on fire, however, was definitely the most counterintuitive moment of the day. I’ll admit that my heart was pounding in my chest when Timo told me to touch the end of my torch into the fire that he’d already lit – every Instagram video I’ve seen of someone throwing a can of gas on a bonfire flashed before my eyes. But, of course, it didn’t explode. Instead, the wick lit and fire started dripping out.
I walked my line as instructed with Steve behind me. It didn’t take much for the dry oak leaves and pine needles to ignite and the fire quickly spread across the forest floor.
Timo was not as timid as I. He walked right through the middle of the burn area, lighting smaller fire lines that he later explained to me were meant to pull the fire into the middle. He was, if you’ll forgive me for being melodramatic, a bit like the choreographer of a dance troupe: the fire danced around him and he directed its movements. The fire was not in control, Timo was.
It was over in about 30 minutes. The whole area we’d cordoned off burned – and it burned hot. The fire only jumped our line at one spot and that was easily contained. Smoke emanated from the charred ground and we retreated across the highway to lean against Timo’s truck and drink a beer. There’d be some mop-up later that afternoon and a bit more the next morning when I found a couple downed logs still on fire, but the bulk of the burn was over, and it was a success.
Here’s how I knew it was a success: a couple of weeks later when my brother, who’d been on the skeptical side, was working in the woods, tending to the thousands of pines he’s planted, he texted me: “The burn area looks great. We need lots more of that.”
He was right. The buckthorn took a serious hit. Wildflowers now litter the forest floor in those acres, no longer shaded out by invasives. Grouse, turkeys and whitetail deer will find this area more hospitable as well as countless other critters.
Next year, we’ll burn more. I might even write a poem about it.
Tony Jones is the author of “The God of Wild Places: Rediscovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors.” He’s a member of RGS & AWS and serves on the board of the Minnesota Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.
