Attend enough lake association meetings, and sooner or later, you’ll hear contradictory advice. One well-meaning speaker (in a fleece vest) wants to safeguard water quality, so idle the lawn mower, leave fallen trees and limbs, and maintain a diverse tangle of waterfront foliage. Cue the slide show of a cottage nestled in the woods, with loons gliding past the dock.
Another equally well-meaning presenter (in a blue or tan uniform) touts advice from FireSmart, a program founded in 1993 that helps owners increase their property’s resilience to wildfire. Mow the lawn, pick up branches, thin surrounding evergreens. Click. Up comes a slide of a tidy yellow cabin on a manicured lawn, with trees that are well-spaced.
After taking in a FireSmart presentation, Bracebridge, Ont., resident and Muskoka Watershed Council member Richard Lammers eyed the white pines and cedars along his stretch of the Muskoka River. “If everyone follows the FireSmart guidelines, it would fundamentally change the feel of the forest we have,” he says. Is it possible, he asks, to protect real estate and still “preserve the natural beauty of my surroundings?”
It’s a pressing question, because a century of energetic firefighting and fire prevention has instead led to denser, more fuel-rich woodlands (thanks, Smokey Bear). Throw in a warming climate, erratic weather, and the popularity of wooded real estate (signaled by double-digit population growth in such classic Ontario cottage communities as Seguin Township and Lake of Bays), and the country is primed for repeats of what happened this past summer in Jasper National Park.
“Wildfire disasters will likely become more frequent, leading to more dramatic consequences, and causing more social disruptions [as well as] physical and ecological losses,” a group of Canadian fire scientists predicted in a report published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction in February 2024. “Fire activity is expected to continue to increase—and even accelerate—until at least the end of this century.”
And that means coping with wildfire will increasingly vie with other cottage landscape concerns, including water quality, wildlife habitat, and whether hammocks are better than chaise lounges. (It’s hammocks hands down, by the way.)
“It’s not the fire situation we grew up with, but it’s what we have to deal with now,” says Alan Westhaver, a retired national park warden and a FireSmart pioneer, now a wildland-urban fire consultant. In 1990, before FireSmart existed, Westhaver collaborated with cottagers on Jasper’s Lake Edith on wildfire-risk reduction, and he knows how cottagers feel about their surroundings. “Being FireSmart doesn’t require mowing down the forest. That’s because this isn’t a wildfire problem,” he says. “Rather, it’s about needing properties to be more fire-resistant, and modifying conditions within 30 metres of cottages is a critical step toward that.”
As he speaks, Westhaver is driving towards the Rockies. He’s visiting his daughter and her family, displaced, like thousands of other Jasper residents, by the catastrophic, almost 33,000-hectare inferno that razed a third of the town. For Westhaver, there’s a silver lining in the survival of 48 of Lake Edith’s 51 cottages. But the Jasper blaze is only the latest to signal that the concerns that launched the FireSmart program decades ago are now a reality. In so many ways, he adds, “this issue has come home to roost.”
Since its inception, FireSmart—now part of the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, which is supported by federal, provincial, and territorial fire management agencies—has offered a template to help landowners fend off flames. Recommendations including pruning or thinning trees (especially conifers) up to 30 metres from structures and outbuildings, mowing lawns, and generally tidying debris have been especially contentious, with detractors labeling the look as “sterile” and “ugly.”
“The argument is that FireSmart is all about cutting trees down, or we want you to concrete your yard. That’s a myth,” says FireSmart education officer Lucy Grainger, who’s based in B.C. “People feel like trees are the main thing to worry about, when in reality, they’re not.” The thing to worry about, she adds, is buildings, their immediate surroundings, and the “fuel”—from trees to woodpiles to deck furniture—sprinkled around cottage lots like lighter fluid on charcoal.
When it comes to lot makeovers— concrete, or otherwise—FireSmart is strictly voluntary. You choose where, what, and how much to do, with the goal of saving your cottage if a fire comes along. “It doesn’t mean fire will never come on your property,” says Westhaver. “But you’ve done what you can to ensure it can’t impact your structure.”
The scheme divides lots into three areas. The “Immediate Zone” includes the cottage, outbuildings, and a 1.5-metre buffer. The “Intermediate Zone” adds another 8.5 metres, and the “Extended Zone” reaches to a 30-metre radius.
To understand why, cottagers need to know how wildfire attacks buildings. When Wisconsin loggers accidentally sparked a more than 3,000-hectare wildfire, known as the Germann Road Fire, on a breezy day in May 2013, they did more than launch a force that destroyed more than 100 structures across a swath of the region south of Lake Superior. Days later, after state and municipal firefighters from more than 40 departments (aided by water bombers from Ontario) had doused the flames, the site became an open-air laboratory.
Scientists surveyed 96 structures (including 46 cottages) probing why some survived while others burned. A key factor: cleared area around the buildings. Surviving structures averaged 7.3 metres of clearance. Those that burned averaged 5.8.
That modest difference was enough to help buildings resist two wildfire traits: radiant heat and flame contact. The physics will be familiar to anyone who’s roasted a marshmallow. The further you are from the bonfire, the less heat you feel. And if you don’t stick your marshmallow in the flames, it’s less likely to char into a blackened, gooey (but still remarkably yummy) mess.
The third weapon, flurries of glowing embers lofted on the wind by convection, is harder to imagine. Soaring hundreds or even thousands of metres from their points of origin, these little arsonists attack buildings directly by flitting through attic vents or sparking eavestroughs filled with needles. Or they light fires around the perimeter by landing on woodpiles or igniting the leaf litter beneath evergreen boughs.
“Think of any place where snowflakes pile up during the first blizzard of the winter. That’s where embers could fall,” says Westhaver. “Ninety per cent of home ignitions during wildfires aren’t caused by the flames, it’s the embers. And you don’t need a big fire to do that.”
Armed with this knowledge and FireSmart’s handy self-assessment checklist, cottagers can survey their lots, selecting priority areas where FireSmart’s recommendations make the most sense. The checklist “really helps you know what your issues are,” says Andrew Hurlbut. The Georgian Bay cottager suffered a near miss in 2018 when the 12,000-hectare Parry Sound 33 wildfire edged within 1.5 kilometres of his island before a wind change pushed the inferno in another direction. “I’d say FireSmart and shoreline naturalization are broad concepts that can be adapted to your own situation. Both can coexist. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”
Even so, “it’s always a trade-off, and there’s no perfect answer,” when it comes to balancing fire protection and environmental health, says B.C. forest ecologist Allen Banner. “Cottages are immersed in a fire landscape. Owning a cottage means you accept that risk to some degree. It’s a no-brainer that you should be doing things to protect your investment, but those efforts don’t have to extend too widely into the forest.”
The advice almost universally shared is to concentrate on the cottage and its immediate surroundings, a.k.a. the Immediate and Intermediate Zones. “If you apply the FireSmart treatment to your cabin and the ten-metre zone, then you can be a little more relaxed about the thirty-metre zone,” says Ken MacRitchie, a FireSmart veteran on B.C.’s Windermere Lake.
Fend off embers by shielding vents and any other opening (except the dryer vent) with 3-mm metal screening; maintaining or installing regular fire-rated asphalt shingles or metal roofing; and evicting needles and leaves from eavestroughs, roof valleys, and from under your cottage. Clear flammable objects (wood chip garden mulch, propane bottles, jerry cans, and ornamental conifers) away from outer walls. When junipers or decorative cedar shrubs ignite, they’re “green gasoline,” says Westhaver. “A one-metre juniper creates a three-metre flame.” Also verboten are hedges and wooden structures, including fences, that attach directly to the cottage. “They act like wicks,” says Grainger.
In the yard, the key concern is “fine fuel,” the seemingly inconsequential dead, dry, and loose debris like twigs, dead standing spruces and cedars, piles of dry leaves, and tall, dry grass. Think of fine fuels as a whole lot of sparklers sitting there, waiting for ignition. Avoid the pyrotechnics by pruning, raking, and mowing, especially before the fire season.
And then, finally, comes the trees located within the Extended Zone. The typical FireSmart prescription includes limiting conifers (cedar, pine, spruce) and favouring hardwoods (poplar, aspen, maple, ash) because they’re slower to ignite and burn. Pruning conifer limbs up to two metres above ground and thinning them so outer branches are three metres from fellow evergreens also reduces the trees’ vulnerability to surface blazes and crown fires. If a fire does occur, it’ll be slower to spread and less intense.
If you’re going to thin, “the goal should not be to completely eliminate forests around your cabin,” says Banner. “You want to leave enough forest cover to offer shade and cool the area.” Done right, he adds, thinning “creates some great opportunities to make your property more interesting. You can encourage native species and mix conifers with deciduous trees—that’s all good.”
Promote ground cover ranging from wild strawberries to ferns, mosses, lowgrowing deciduous shrubs, and native plants, like the twinflower (Linnaea borealis). Leave some “coarse” debris—downed trees and limbs larger than 15 centimetres in diameter, because deadfall “is among the most ecologically important trees in the forest” says Westhaver. “They feed the soil. They’re essential to the food chain for all kinds of birds, animals, and insects.” They also provide important habitat. “It’s okay to have a few of these fallen trees criss-crossed on the ground,” he adds. “But if it’s difficult to walk, you’ve got too many.”
While you’re at it, select healthy saplings in the understory to regenerate the stand. Keep successor conifers at least three metres away from elders, so Junior won’t ignite Grandma. “The last thing you want is to thin the forest and have a sea of conifer saplings coming up,” says Banner. In this case, rather than reducing fire potential, “you might have just made things worse.”
Along waterfronts, a natural approach is almost always the best option. Usually, “the more vegetation, the better,” says Meaghan McDonald, a lake and shoreline stewardship coordinator with eastern Ontario’s Rideau Valley Conservation Authority. Near shores, “we tell people to talk to their local authorities and follow the rules,” adds Grainger. “The benefit of riparian areas is they’re near the water and soils tend to be wetter, so they’re less likely to burn.”
But even here, there’s a catch. Banner warns that a prevailing wind that funnels embers down the length of a lake could ignite the riparian area and threaten near-shore cottages. If that scenario’s likely at your place, pruning dead and fine fuels and substituting fire-resistant deciduous shrubs, including ninebark, serviceberry, and red osier dogwood could be wise moves.
The other tricky area is slopes. Because fires can race up a fuel-laden slope, FireSmart recommends thinning and fuel-reduction on the downhill side of the cottage. But tread carefully, Banner urges. “Root systems are very important in preventing erosion and promoting slope stability.” To keep that soil in place, work incrementally, and consider advice from conservation authorities or foresters.
When it comes to finding the right balance, folks like Ken MacRitchie on B.C.’s Windermere Lake are already figuring it out. On the edge of his property, highly flammable native prairie plants— sage, rabbitbrush, and bunchgrasses— provide cover for nesting birds. The lawn surrounding the cabin “gives me enough of a buffer from the standing grass that I’m confident a fire wouldn’t cause a problem,” he says. “I like my native prairie grass, but because it could be a risk during a fire, I enjoy it at a distance.”
Back in Bracebridge, Richard Lammers has started cleaning needles off his roof (gutter guards help with the eavestroughs). “FireSmart got me looking more carefully at my yard and prompted me to evaluate it more closely,” he says. “There’s a small cluster of conifers close to the cottage, and they’re dropping a lot of needles on the roof. There’s a few thin trees and one large one,” he adds. There’s no deadline yet, but “I’m definitely going to cut back the thin ones.”
If cottagers can turn down the thermostat on wildfires in an environmentally sensitive way, “we can have fires, and then we can still go back home, back to work, or to the cottage,” says Westhaver. “We’re going to have fires, but we don’t have to have disasters.”
Award-winning writer Ray Ford is now having second thoughts about the ornamental cedars he has around his Northern Ontario property.
This story originally appeared in our Winter ’24 issue.
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