Good morning. Today is August 8, 2006, and we’re reporting on fires in the Pacific Northwest.
Yesterday was a deadly day for firefighters in the American West. Two helicopter pilots died on the Widemouth 2 Fire in Central Utah, and a dozer operator died the night before last, during a blowup on the Wrights Spring fire, northeast of Klamath Falls, Oregon.
The Wrights Spring Fire has grown aggressively over the past three days, mainly to the east, and threatens structures in the Sprague River area. This area has a recent history of large fires in the extensive second growth timber stands. In 2021, the Bootleg fire burned for weeks here, consuming over 400,000 acres. The Wrights Spring Fire is somewhat contained by irrigated pastures and valleys to the east and west, but still has at least 50,000 acres of contiguous timber available to it before it reaches Highway 140, to the SE.
Further north, the West Zone of the Rowe Creek Complex continues to challenge indirect firefighting tactics. The fire is being driven by spotting, and yesterday the fire spotted over Highway 26 and made a major run to the east, burning about 1,500 acres east of the Highway.
Firefighters have struggled with both direct and indirect attack on the heavily timbered portions of this fire, and the fire has tended to be controlled when it left timberlands and entered more scrubby brushlands. It took a long time for the incident command teams to settle on a strategy for indirect attack. Earlier in this incident, when it was being managed by Oregon Department of Forestry, their tactic was to swarm resources to the most active parts of the fire.
We’ve seen similar ‘swarming’ strategies fail to succeed on major fires like the Dixie Fire in 2021 in Northern California, where firefighters spent the first week of the fire attempting to corral the fire within the smallest possible footprint rather than recognizing that the fire was off the chain, and would require a bigger box/indirect firefighting approach. This type of strategy can squander much-needed time that is required to prep and execute a successful indirect attack – it often takes over a week to prepare an indirect fire line that can be successfully fired out from, and since this often means giving up 10s of 1000s of timberland, State agencies like ODF or Cal Fire are more hesitant to go there than the Feds are. However, the alternative, if the team waits too long to pivot to an indirect strategy, is that they don’t have enough time to successfully prepare an adaquate indirect line, and they end up losing attempt after attempt after attempt. This has been what has played out here on the south end of the West Zone of the Rowe Creek Complex, where multiple indirect lines have been lost over the past week, and the fire is well established across Highway 26, with potential to spread farther east in heavy continuous fuels.
Moving up to the east side of Mount Hood, the Grasshopper Fire continues to run freely in heavy, continuous timber. Some firing has occurred along Highway 35 to try to corral the fire east of the highway, but with long-range spotting being the primary driver of this fire, along with strong afternoon winds, many of the firing operations on this fire have failed in the last several days.
There are two fires burning currently in Washington that have begun to make major runs after as many as two or three weeks since their ignitions – the High Lava, and Three Queens Fires, north of Skamania, and Interstate 90/Snoqualmie Pass, respectively.
When we have multiple fire starts across the region during lightning busts, some fires are selected to be lower priority and receive fewer resources. Both of these fires started in fairly remote areas with poor access and didn’t do much for the first couple weeks. But now have run and are over are either nearing or over 1000 acres each. We expect that due to the terrain and continuous fuel, these fires will be with us for the rest of the season. Both these fires will likely eventually pose some threat to structures either along the I-90 corridor or in the case of High Lava, in valleys to the east.
There is a new fire on the north side of Mount Rainier. The Grand Park 2 Fire is reported to be 200 acres.
Farther north, the Little Giant Fire made a major run to the south yesterday, and the Sinlahekin fire continues to make daily substantial runs to the west in heavy timber.
Elsewhere in the northwest, the Hagen Fire, east of Pendleton, continues to run east seeking targets of opportunity in continuous timber fuels.
The Tartar Fire has burned most of the area back to the Snake River, and still has some activity on the northeast side. We, from reporting in the Idaho Statesman Journal, that firefighters disengaged from portions of this fire several days ago due to threats from ranchers that did not appreciate the indirect approach being used with firefighting and backfiring operations.
The Big Grass Fire is now over 430,000 acres, and is mainly burning in southwest Idaho, where it continues to spread at will. The politics here are very bad. This fire has been a low priority fire for resources due to its extremely remote nature. Ranchers are in a bind here, and in many other parts of the rural West. They are getting limited resources from the Feds, but if they attempt to do their own firefighting or firing operations, they can be arrested for arson. This kind of conflict was at the root of the standoff on the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, several years ago – the occupiers of the refuge were there in solidarity with the Hammond Family, local ranchers who had been arrested for lighting a backfire on a large blaze that didn’t have many outside resources.
Northern California continues to be very quiet, wildfire wise. It has been very hot, but there isn’t much wind. On the Hoopa Indian Reservation, in the NW corner of the State, the Milepost 18 fire is burning near an earlier fire in July, the Milepost 16 fire. This Milepost 18 Fire made a major run yesterday afternoon and is over 300 acres.
That’s it for today’s report. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more in-depth reporting, specifically on the west zone of the Roe Creek Complex, and on the new-old fires (High Lava and Three Queens) in Washington.