However with the elimination of selective burning and the institution of a national policy of putting out lightning-caused fires as quickly as possible, a series of consequences unanticipated by the agency quickly developed.  Without periodic clearing by fire, debris accumulated at the base of the large pines and firs served as fuel for conflagrations hot enough to kill healthy trees in large numbers.  With the accumulation of decades of uncleared debris thousands of acres of forest [now] burn uncontrollably every year in what has come to be called the fire season.  In the absence of periodic burning the grassy open quality of much of the country was superseded by dense, brushy chaparral.    The no-burn policy was intended by the Forest Service to protect the forest, which was now conceived of as a gigantic tree farm.  From this perspective, perfection of the forest through human intervention would result in a perpetual source of lumber.  In fact, even the trees themselves, genetically chosen and now genetically altered, would be superior to those trees reduced by the multi-purpose vagaries of a general process of natural selection.  This has not been the case as observers of the forest such as Charley Thom, a Karuk medicine man, are quick to point out in critiquing the agency's concept of forest management.

 Plantation they call it.  They don’t call it no more forest.  They call it plantations, like they was raising corn or beans (chuckles).  Did you ever see a wedge that you split wood with?  That’s how their trees look.  Big butt down here and tapers up like a wedge.  I don’t know what they are doing wrong.  It ain’t like my trees out here, this is natural.  You can see the son of a gun, same size, way up, slow tapers.  But you go see the plantation.  I don’t care whether it’s fir, or Ponderosa, you know, same thing.  You watch it.  You go out there and see – short plant, short and stubby, wedge shaped, big on the bottom and pushing up fast.

 The trees grown in unthinned plantations grow like "wedges or ice cream cones” with a fast taper and knots throughout which limit their utility as building materials when compared with trees characteristic of the Indian managed forest which grow more slowly, have little taper and few lower limbs.

 Ironically, the policy of fire suppression was a dramatic success only in its disruption of the natural cleansing process of lightning-caused fires and the ancient processes of human regularization of these burning cycles.  As the frequency of fires decreased, their magnitude increased and the forest ecology was quickly altered. 

 With better than 40 years of first-hand observation Katherine George, a local woman of the Salmon River recalled:

 I guess the people have disliked the Forest Service forever, because (Forest Service managers are) ignorant and they don't know what they're doing.  They're not taking care of the forest and you can just sit here and see they don't.  It used to make the old timers mad when they put the fires out. They'd tell them; 'If you don't let the fires burn, some day there'll be a hell of a fire!' They told them, 'Let the fires burn.'  

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