Big Cliff Fire – 8/1/2025

The Big Cliff Fire, on the Klamath National Forest, in far NW California, looks like it will be with us for awhile.

Here is last night’s IR map.

Big Cliff Fire Overview

• The Big Cliff Fire is on a steep slope, making mapped acreage inacurate.
• The fire is burning inside the “Whites Fire” from 2014, portions of which were a high-severity fire.
• The landscape is steep and has 10-year-old burnt forest with dead and down wood, making firefighting difficult.
• Firefighters face dangerous conditions due to standing dead rotten trees, known as burning snag patches.
• The fire is burning in a recent burn scar, cleaning up dead and down material.
• The fire is expected to burn for a while, but will likely be beneficial for the majority of the burned landscape it reburns.
• The fire’s behavior is influenced by the previous fire’s severity and the management history of the area.
• The ability of land manager to use fire to restore the previously-burned landscape is constrained by economic pressures including nearby ‘forest carbon offset investments’ on neighboring private timberlands, and the need for local residents to breathe clean air.

Big Cliff Fire is Likely to Grow Large and That is Not All Bad.

Let’s start off our Big Cliff Fire coverage by looking at the preliminary fire effects mapping of the Butler Fire, which just burned about 15 miles west of the Big Cliff Fire between July 1 and July 20th of this year. Like the Big Cliff Fire, which is burning in the 2014 Whites Fire scar, the Butler Fire reburned an area which burned in the human-caused 2013 Butler Fire. Satellite imagery captured on 7/30/2025 of the Butler Fire shows that the fire burned with a mixed severity, as is typical of fires reburning recently-burned areas in the Klamath Mountains.

Judging from satellite imagery, it appears that many of the larger trees which survived the 2013 Butler Fire, survived this one, as well. Like the Big Cliff Fire, the Butler also had large volumes of dead and down material in place. The Butler Fire appears to have burned with high severity mainly in areas which had burned severely in 2013, which were covered mainly in shrub.

The current energy release component ratings (general forest flammability) are lower now than they were 2 weeks ago, when the Butler Fire was burning (see chart, below).

Here are 7/30/2025 satellite images of the Butler Fire. Green areas still have green foliage on them, and red areas generally do not. I have been interpreting these types of images for the past 2 decades, and find that while they often underestimate some of the tree mortality, they are generally pretty good at showing large-scale trends. We have had commercial projects mapping wildfire severity for major industrial timber company, and have done extensive field work to calibrate our eyeballs with this stuff.

The Big Cliff Fire started from lightning in the past couple days, and started huffing and puffing last night. It was mapped at 24 acres this morning, and was putting up a decent smoke column for most of the day, visible on the Fort Jones and Hayfork Bally webcams. The fire is burning in the 2014 Whites Fire burn (green in map, below), just west of the Russian Wilderness in an area with extremely heavy dead and down fuel loading of logs and branches from the 11 year-old fire. The blue area to the south (top of map) burned in the 2021 River Complex Fires.

Purple areas to the east are private timberlands managed by Ecotrust Forest Management. Yellow areas are managed by New Forests. Some of the EFM lands are in carbon offset holdings.
Green outline is Russian Wilderness.

As of about 9pm, the fire had grown to about 260 acres. It is well-established in teh extremely steep Russian Creek watershed, and will be very difficult or impossible to contain now with direct attack. If there is not much competition for crews and aircraft in the next week, the Forest Service may soak the headwaters of a river system whose namesake salmon are on the brink of extinction with aquatically-toxic retardant, with the goal of slowing the fire enough to allow a bunch of hotshot crews to cut 10,000 cords of firewood thru the heavy dead and sketchy snag patches to secure a fireline. This is a long shot, though. We are entering peak fire season, few structures are currently (or will ever be) threatened by this fire, and just about anywhere else in the country will be a higher priority for the elite crews and aircraft.

Looking at the opportunities presented by the terrain, If the fire does get an indirect attack strategy, we estimate the fire will burn across at least 15,000 acres, and possibly up to 25,000 acres, with the majority of the timbered areas getting low-moderate severity. The shrub areas will generally experience higher-severity fire. This is a very similar setup to the nearby 2025 Butler Fire, which burned in almost identical terrain in a similar-aged burn scar. As mentioned, above, the Butler Fire appears to have achieved a lot of resource benefits in the 2 weeks that it was burning, earlier this month.

Since the fire has initially established on the upper slope of the drainage, much of the initial burning will be with backing fire behavior, which is generally lower-severity. This may allow many of the larger trees to survive this fire. Places where the fire make headfire runs will have higher severity. However, many of the slopes exposed to headfire runs already burned hot in the 2014 Whites Fire.

The graphic below is a simplified projection of areas which may get backing (blue) vs headfire (orange) fire. Black is a potential control line location.

Forecasts

Weather conditions are fairly mild in NW California, at the moment, with forecasts for below-average seasonal temps and fuel moistures, and good humidity recoveries at night.

Generally, fuel flammability is below seasonal averages in Northern California right now, trending closer to the most extreme conditions recorded in early June of mid-October, over the past 22 years. These conditions are often conducive to beneficial fire effects, and are closer to common prescribed fire prescriptions than critical wildfire concerns.