2023 Butte Cal-TREX

By Wolfy Rougle, José Luis Duce, and Andrea Bustos

This year marks the Watershed Research and Training Center’s third year supporting the Butte County Cal-TREX event. The Watershed Center has supported this event utilizing funding from the California Department of Conservation’s Regional Forest and Fire Capacity program (RFFC). This funding has supported Watershed Center staff time to provide coaching, mentorship and organization, as well as a community-based prescribed fire subaward, awarded to the Butte Resource Conservation District. The subaward in turn has supported both the Cal-TREX event and the Butte Prescribed Burn Association (PBA). The flexibility of the RFFC funding has allowed the Watershed Center and the Butte County RCD to focus on investing in people, with a focus on local prescribed fire capacity building. This funding is a unique and invaluable example of what empowered funding focused on the right factors with reduced barriers can provide to a local area.

          The Butte County Cal-TREX Incident Management Team (IMT) is made up of 18 different local partner organizations with 40 individuals, including liaisons, leaders, coaches, trainers and organizers.

          Over the last three years, this alliance of diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills, visions and passionate fire practitioners have accomplished an equally diverse array of goals and objectives. The Butte County Cal-TREX team has provided an enormous amount of hands-on training hours in a safe, inclusive and healthy environment, maintaining and extending relationships among organizations, cooperators and stakeholders and continuing building local capacity with a strong cultural and ecological component.  The team has also paired up with the Plumas County Cal-TREX in sisterhood, offering resources and technical support to each other from one end of the Feather River Canyon to the other.  

          The Butte and Plumas Counties Cal-TREX teams have obtained and gained recognition and appreciation from the communities and, most recently, from the agencies who originally offered some hesitation about community-based good fire. Through a steady commitment to strengthening cooperation among organizations, the Butte County burn community has transitioned from a situation in which permits were sometimes difficult to get and were required 365 days a year, to a situation where CAL FIRE burn permits are no longer required after the end of declared fire season (which is in alignment with the California Public Resources Code).

          Another sign of positive effects and results are the members of the IMT. There is a “new generation” of leaders and mentors, those who attended the Butte Cal-TREX the first time, and now are part of the cadre, fully engaged and playing essential roles in continuing providing learning opportunities and exchanging experiences and knowledge. Original 2021 Butte Cal-TREX instigators such as Eli Goodsell, Wolfy Rougle, He-Lo Ramirez, Don Hankins, and Zeke Lunder, will still play an essential role, but meanwhile, newer names from 2022 and 2023 such as Dallas Koller, Mitch Bamford, Maira Iqbal, Lindsay Amundson, new Butte PBA coordinator David Mitchell, Ian Colunga and others, will start to sound more familiar among stations and positions when burning in the foothills of the valley. Thanks, Butte County Cal-TREX, for being an example of what cooperative community fire can look like.

View a printer-friendly PDF version of this article here: Butte CalTREX 2023.

The work upon which this publication is based was funded in whole or in part through a Regional Forest and Fire Capacity grant awarded by the California Department of Conservation, and by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s Business and Workforce Development Grants.