Team Rubicon Helps Moab Coalition Clear Wildfire Fuels Along Pack Creek

Team Rubicon’s return to Pack Creek cleared nearly three acres of Russian olive, cutting one of Moab’s most flammable creekside invasives and sending the removed material back into the community instead of the landfill. Wood chips from the work were salvaged for weed control, and truckloads of felled logs were donated, helping FireBREAK push about 3,500 cubic feet of wood to local residents and charities, including Warm Elders.

That matters far beyond one narrow riparian stretch. Pack Creek runs through a corridor hikers, cyclists and wildlife watchers use constantly, and the fuel load along the creek has long shaped how exposed the Moab Valley feels when hot, dry weather returns. FireBREAK has made those waterways and the land around them a priority, focusing on dense stands of Russian olive, tamarisk, Siberian elm and Ravenna grass along Pack Creek, Mill Creek and the Matheson Wetlands, especially near structures and water.

The March deployment fit into a larger Fortify Moab effort backed by a $5.2 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Forest Service says Community Wildfire Defense Grants began in 2022 and are part of a $1 billion, five-year competitive program meant to help at-risk communities and tribes plan for and reduce wildfire danger across federal, state, tribal and private lands. In Moab, that funding has turned into a coordinated local push rather than isolated cleanup days.

Kara Dohrenwend, executive director of Rim to Rim Restoration, has said the goal is to dramatically reduce hazardous fuels in the Moab Valley, but no single group can handle that scale alone. FireBREAK brings together the Moab Valley Fire Department, Grand County Weeds, Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, the Grand County Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Management, Science Moab, Utah Conservation Corps, Moab Solutions and the City of Moab, with Team Rubicon adding veteran-led manpower for mitigation and prevention work.

The Pack Creek corridor has already paid the price for delay. Earlier coverage in Moab noted that nearly 600 acres of creek-bottomland still needed mitigation after the Cinema Court Fire, and both the 2018 Cinema Court Fire and the 2022 Murphy Lane Fire started along Pack Creek. With those scars still part of the local memory, every acre cleared now is one less acre feeding the next fire season.