An Interview with the Forester Who Called It a Ghastly Mistake and Was Overruled by Ninety Years of Fire

The Docket's Archive section occasionally conducts interviews with historical figures who, owing to the inconvenience of being dead, are unable to provide fresh quotes. What follows is a conversation reconstructed entirely from Elers Koch's published writings, professional correspondence, and documented record. His words are drawn from "The Passing of the Lolo Trail" (1935), his memoir Forty Years a Forester (1953), and institutional responses preserved in Forest Service archives. We did not speak with Koch. Koch has been unavailable for comment since 1954. But the man left enough on paper that he doesn't need our help.

In February 1935, Elers Koch published an essay in the Journal of Forestry that amounted to professional heresy. Koch was assistant regional forester for the Northern Region, Yale-trained, a veteran of the 1910 Big Blowup, and a man whose colleagues marveled at his ability to hike twenty grueling miles before dinner and then relax with a few more for dessert.¹ After a quarter century fighting fires across the Selway and Clearwater drainages of central Idaho, he argued that the entire enterprise had been pointless. The Forest Service should stop building roads into the backcountry, stop pretending suppression worked at scale, and leave these mountains "pretty much to the forces of nature."²

The Journal of Forestry ran a rebuttal alongside his essay. Three months later, Chief Forester Ferdinand Silcox issued the 10 a.m. policy, mandating that every wildfire in America be controlled by ten o'clock the morning after detection.³ Silcox had drawn the opposite lesson from the same 1910 fires. The policy would stand for forty-three years. Koch would be dead for eighteen of them before the first exception was granted, in the very drainage he'd been writing about.⁴

We find Koch in his Missoula office, the February issue still on his desk.

You've just published what amounts to a professional confession. Thirty years of effort described as producing "no appreciable difference in the area burned over." Why now?

Koch: The Selway, last summer. A hundred and eighty thousand acres. We had men in there, we had money, we had the CCC boys building trails and telephone lines into country that has no business having telephone lines. And when fire got a good start in the dry fire-killed cedar and grand fir, and burning conditions were just right — well, the whole United States Army, if it was on the ground, could do nothing but keep out of the way.²

I've been watching this for twenty-five years. 1910, 1919, 1929, 1934. Each time, we say we needed more men, more equipment, more roads. Each time, we get them. Each time, the fire burns what it was going to burn regardless. At some point you have to ask whether you're learning anything at all, or just repeating yourself more expensively.

Your colleagues in Washington read the same history and reached the opposite conclusion.

Koch: (pause) Yes. Well. Silcox was in the Northern Region after 1910. He saw what I saw. He concluded the lesson was that we hadn't tried hard enough. I concluded we'd been trying at something that can't be done. Not in that country. Not at that scale. We looked at the same burned ridgelines and one of us saw a failure of effort and the other saw a failure of premise.

I don't question his sincerity. I question his arithmetic.

The editorial note on your essay calls it "a somewhat partisan discussion" by someone who is "evidently a wilderness area enthusiast." You've been in the Forest Service since 1903.

Koch: Thirty-two years. I drew the boundaries of most of the national forests in this region. I founded the Savenac Nursery, largest in the Service. I have fought more fires in the Lochsa and Selway drainages than any man alive, and I am telling you, from that experience:

And they call me an enthusiast.

That word does a lot of work, doesn't it. Thirty-two years of field experience reclassified as a hobby.

Koch: What bothers me more is the roads. Roads are such final and irretrievable facts.² The Lolo Trail — do you understand what that was? Centuries of Nez Perce and Blackfeet Indians, Lewis and Clark, fur traders, General Howard's cavalry. The trail was worn deep by all of them. And now the bulldozer blade has ripped out the hoof tracks of Chief Joseph's ponies, and in its place there is only the print of the automobile tire in the dust.²

You can change a fire policy. You cannot uncut a road.

You raise something in the essay I want to press you on. You suggest that by putting out smaller fires in favorable seasons, the Service may have been setting the stage for larger ones.

Koch: It is even possible — I'll put it that carefully — that by extinguishing fires in favorable seasons which would have run over a few hundred or a few thousand acres, the stage was only set for the greater conflagrations which went completely beyond fireline control.²

Fire has been in these mountains longer than we have. The trees evolved with it. The Nez Perce managed with it. We arrive and declare it an enemy to be eliminated, and then we are surprised when the fuel we've been saving up for thirty years burns all at once instead of a little at a time.

I don't know what else we expected.

You used the phrase "ghastly mistake." That's strong language for a government publication.

Koch:

I chose that comparison deliberately. We are watching the dust blow off the plains right now, this year, because someone decided the grass was in the way of progress. I am watching the same logic applied to fire. Remove the thing that seems like an obstacle. Discover, too late, that it was structural.

Bob Marshall tells me you're working together on protecting the Selway as a primitive area. Fighting on two fronts.

Koch: (slight smile) Marshall is a good man. Tireless. He and Leopold and the others founding this Wilderness Society — they understand what's at stake. If we cannot stop the roads, we can at least designate the places where roads must not go. I won't call it a consolation. It's a holding action.

The trouble is that this country presents such an unusually difficult fire-control problem that even twice or thrice the current expenditure will not ensure any considerable reduction in the area that would burn without attempted control. It is time to withdraw from a losing game before more millions are expended with little or no results.²

I am fifty-five years old. I have spent my career in these mountains. I know what the virgin stand looked like, and I know it will be a hundred years or more before we again have a big forest.⁵ If we hope to retain any such areas for our future pleasure, they must be specially protected.

Do you think the essay will change anything?

Koch: (long pause)

I think I wrote what I know to be true, and I published it where my colleagues could read it, and I will stand behind it. What the Service does with it is not mine to control. I've been a forester for thirty-two years. The profession opened up just in time to offer me the kind of life and work that fit my desires and upbringing.⁵ I owe it an honest account.

Whether anyone acts on it — well. That's above my pay grade, as the Army men say.

Koch retired from the Forest Service in 1944. He died in 1954. In 1972, the White Cap Creek drainage in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness — the very landscape Koch had written about, whose primitive-area boundaries he drew himself in 1936 — became the first place in America where the 10 a.m. policy was formally set aside, and fire was allowed to do what Koch had argued it should have been doing all along.⁴ The policy was abandoned nationally in 1978. By then, decades of suppressed fire had loaded forests across the American West with fuel that would feed the megafire era Koch's essay had, in a single sentence, predicted.

Today, the United States spends billions annually fighting wildfires that burn through the accumulated fuel of a century of suppression — fires that are hotter, faster, and more destructive than anything Koch witnessed in 1910.⁶ He had asked his question, published it in the professional journal, and watched the institution formalize the opposite answer. The question didn't go away. It just got more expensive.

Koch asked whether it was all a ghastly mistake. The forests answered.

Footnotes

1. Larson, Andrew J. "Introduction to the Article by Elers Koch: The Passing of the Lolo Trail." Fire Ecology 12(1):1–6 (2016). https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.4996/fireecology.1201001 ↩

2. Koch, Elers. "The Passing of the Lolo Trail." Journal of Forestry (February 1935); reprinted in Fire Ecology 12(1):7–12 (2016). https://fireecology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/BF03400632 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Forest History Society. "U.S. Forest Service Fire Suppression." https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/u-s-forest-service-fire-suppression/ ↩

4. USDA Forest Service RMRS-GTR-428. A History of Wilderness Fire Management in the Northern Rockies (2021). https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs_series/rmrs/gtr/rmrs_gtr428.pdf ↩ ↩²

5. Koch, Elers. Forty Years a Forester (1953; Mountain Press Publishing, 1998). https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9781496213358 ↩ ↩²

6. Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Reigniting the 10 A.M. Mistake." (July 2025). https://www.taxpayer.net/disaster/reigniting-the-10-a-m-mistake/ ↩