The Butler Fire jumped the Salmon River late yesterday afternoon and made a run. By 3am the slopover was 285 acres.
Firefighting on the new front will be quite the puzzle, there’s a lot of line near the slop from the Jacket Fire, earlier this month, and a 2021 fire upstream on the North Fork Salmon. They’ve got to keep it out of Crapo Creek, though.
The Klamath is kind of like the Feather River, you don’t see a lot of medium-sized fires. Either we keep them really small or they burn the whole world. They used a lot of retardant on the slop yesterday, but a ton of spot fires are visible upriver on the IR. They will likely continue to bomb the ridge like crazy with retardant to keep it out of Crapo, today, if they get the visibility, but morning smoke inversions usually prevent tanker use before the afternoon, and fire has a lot of time to creep thru the previous day’s retardant.
It’s always ironic to see a wildfire threaten to burn a bunch of ground we’ve just expended an enormous amount of energy to keep fire out of. The area around the Jacket Fire, which started in the same lightning bust as the Butler, and was suppressed fairly quickly, may get gobbled up now, by a fire which runs up Crapo Creek from the bottom.
Most of the area in Crapo Creek to the north of the new front on Butler burned 17 years ago in the 2008 Jake Fire. Areas upstream in the North Fork Salmon River burned in 2013 and again in 2021.
Butler Fire shown in yellow crosshatch and outline, below. Historic fires in colored outlines. Check out CalTopo.com to explore this data yourself.
