GREENVILLE – A fire lookout spotted the smoke on Labor Day, and air tankers were making drops on the flames within 20 minutes.

But the September 2007 blaze that came to be known as the Moonlight fire quickly spread through dense, dry timber. Over the next two weeks, it cut a ferocious swath through Plumas County's forests, ultimately destroying more than 65,000 acres.

In part because the land hadn't been logged in many years, the fire moved faster and burned hotter than most forest fires, quickly moving from tinder-dry underbrush to smaller dead trees and finally to the tops of the most towering pines.

For years, timber harvesting on public lands has been stymied by concerns about logging's environmental damage. But now more than a few former timber workers who have visited the site wonder whether the fire could have been stopped sooner if they'd been able to thin out some of that wood years ago.

"The Moonlight fire is compelling us to rethink how we manage our forests and how we relate to the forest," said Jonathan Kusel of the Sierra Institute, a natural resource sociologist in Taylorsville who has studied timber-dependent rural communities for more than 20 years.

"I'm not saying we need to go back to the days of clear-cutting," said Kusel, who spent two days on the front lines fighting the blaze. "But we have to manage our forests and look at our forests differently. The Moonlight fire proved that."

Although wildfires have been part of the Western landscape for centuries, recent studies have tied climate changes in heat and moisture throughout the West to fires that burn higher and hotter. The Moonlight fire, fueled by heavy brush and timber, burned so hot that it even incinerated the soil.

Nearly two years later, much of the land is still desolate. On the public land that burned, thousands of acres of dead trees stand ready to fall in a strong wind. But in other areas, there are signs of life.

The fire also destroyed a thousand acres of private forest land managed by Jim Chapin, a private forester from Red Bluff. Chapin designed a so-called "sustained yield plan" for the Engel-mine forest in which crews cut only as many trees as the forest could regenerate.

"We only did selective harvesting, and the forest looked great and it was more productive," Chapin said.

It's the kind of forest that has a better chance of surviving a fire. But the Engelmine forest was surrounded by national forests that hadn't been thinned in years. So when the Moonlight fire tore through the tangled forests around it, the Engelmine forest also went up in flames.

But the private forest is coming back. Chapin got the burned timber removed and sold, and this spring he led a crew that planted more than 60,000 seedlings. Some of the native plants are also returning.

"It's already getting pretty vegetated," Chapin said.

Thinning forests aids fire survival

A managed forest's ability to survive a fire is clearly illustrated 15 miles from where the Moonlight fire started, at the Collins Almanor forest in Chester. Like the Engel-mine forest, the Collins forest is managed on a sustained-yield plan. In fact, according to Jay Francis, the forest manager for the Collins Pine Co., there is more timber standing in the Collins forest today than when the company bought its land and began logging in Plumas County in 1902.

On the day the Moonlight fire started, a human-caused blaze ignited in the Collins forest. It burned for about 10 hours before crews reached it, but they were able to extinguish it quickly.

The difference, Francis said, was that the forest had been carefully thinned for years. There were no so-called "ladder fuels" – underbrush and small, dead trees that allow a ground fire to climb up to the bigger trees. So while the Moonlight fire was tearing through thousands of acres of dense, untended stands of timber, the Collins fire was contained to just 3 acres.

"In some ways I wished the Moonlight fire had been closer to civilization ... to remind folks what we need to be doing to manage our forests," Francis said.