The Green Fire has been burning for several days in a remote area northeast of Shasta Lake, and poses some special challenges for firefighters.
This fire is going to burn for a while, and could reach over 10,000 acres in size.
Here is a link to our livestream for this article. Read the material below for more context, and links.
The Green Fire has potential to burn to the 2024 Shoe Fire, which we covered in detail last fall. The current hope/strategy is to contain the fire at Fenders Ferry Road (FFR), which is the only major east-west road thru this landscape. The fire is currently about 9 miles from FFR at Goose Gap, the divide between the Pit River and Sulanharas Creek, and about 6 miles from FFR, in general.
The fire is still pretty high on the slopes, and not yet well-established in the bottoms of the major drainages, but hand crews disengaged from the most active portions of the fire this morning due to increasing fire activity and a lack of solid anchor points. Based upon IR mapping from 1 am and 1 pm, the fire is growing in every direction. Mapping below shows the fire’s growth between 1 am (white line) and 1 pm, 7/5/2025.
A large-scale firing operation is likely in the coming days along Fenders Ferry Road.
So how likely is it that this fire can be contained at Fenders Ferry Road? I’d say the odds are decent. The 2024 Shoe Fire maps show the FFR corridor was prepped for use as a fireline. Usually this means that trees were pruned and brush was chipped along the road, and often, snags have been fallen. If the prep job was significant, there may be time for the fire team to muster the crews, engines, and potentially, UAV teams to light the ridge/slopes to the west of FFR ahead of the fire’s arrival.
If conducted with beneficial fire effects in mind, firing operations can generate low-moderate severity fire, which is what this landscape needs. Good fire effects are easier to achieve if nighttime temperatures stay low and humidities are higher. There are also many recent examples of mid-summer firing operations going badly, burning with great severity, and causing the fire to grow even more than it would have without intervention.
We’ve talked a lot about firing operations on this site, if you’re interested in learning more about them, check out these articles.
What do you need to pull off a large-scale firing operation?
One key to successful firing operations is having adequate time to prepare for them. Often, firing is used as a last resort after days of initial-attack (often swarming the fire with resources without a cohesive tactical plan) fail. For a firing operation to succeed, crews need time to prep a fireline, thinning heavy fuels adjacent to it, and dropping snags (standing dead trees) near the line. Once the line is prepped (and often plumbed with pumps and hoses), crew conduct the firing, hold the fire at the control line, and then mop up the edge of the fired line.
It’s not enough to fire the line and walk away. If an uncut snag remains next to the line and it catches on fire and falls across the line, bringing fire with it after the crews leave, all of that work can be in vain. On major timber fires, constructing a major indirect fireline may entail using feller-buncher mechanical logging machines to thin dense forests along the desired control line (usually a major road or ridgetop dozer line). When we get to this scale of choreographing fire on the landscape, it becomes very important to be able to make educated judgements as to how much time you have for prep before the fire arrives. An old maxim for large fire control is “Don’t just fall back to the next ridge, figure out which ridge you can get the work done on before the fire actually arrives, and go there”.
One of the problems with trying to out-think the fire like this is that our predictive tools aren’t really that great. Fire behavior analysts run numerical models of fire spread that consider the vegetation, topography, fuel moisture, and predicted weather. But the math that most of these models are built on top of dates back to the 1970s, and fire behavior during our recent megafires has often greatly exceeded the models’ expectations. Another weakness in the models is the resolution of the weather data we have to work with. Micro-scale winds are incredibly difficult to predict, but wind is by far the biggest influencer of fire behavior.
So what does this mean for the odds of catching the fire at Fenders Ferry Road?
Time will tell! One of the open-source models I am looking at today says the Green Fire is likely to run all the way to Fenders Ferry Road by 8pm, tonight. I don’t think this will happen, the alignment of topography, wind, and fuels is there, but burning conditions aren’t quite critical, with temps in the mid 80s, and RHs in the mid 20, at present.
It seems likely the fire could take several days to get to FFR, and that they may be able to muster resources to get the firing done. This will be no small feat, though, as there are 6 miles of road between Goose Gap and the Pit River. This seems like the highest priority flank of the fire, however, as if the fire crosses FFR, it will burn another 5,000 acres before it gets to the next major tactical opportunity/ridge system.
To the west, the fire will mainly back and flank to Shasta Lake, but there is potential for major nighttime runs to the west, due to the influence of major downcanyon winds. There is a non-zero chance the fire could cross Shasta Lake and threaten Round Mountain and Montgomery Creek, but that will be discussed in future posts as that part of the story unfolds.
If the fire crosses Fenders Ferry Road and keeps going…
North of Fenders Ferry Road, the 2012 Bagley Fire area is mainly checkerboard ownership between Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) and the US Forest Service (USFS). After the 2012 fire, SPI salvaged and replanted most of their lands, and as such, their there are a lot of young stands, many of which have been pre-commercial thinned, with varying amounts of slash in them. Many of the USFS lands in the burn had a more mixed severity burn in 2012, with many of the larger trees surviving, especially on the north slopes. It’s a really interesting place to snoop around in Google Earth Pro, toggling thru the historic imagery.
You can kind of get a peek into the 2012 Bagley Fire area on the panoramic view on the Shoeinhorse Mtn webcam:
Here is a map showing the Green Fire, 2024 Shoe Fire (blue), and Bagley Fires (green). Black lines are 2024 Shoe dozer lines, blue are prepped roads. Fenders Ferry is main road thought the middle of the map. There was a lot of pot growing in this area in the teens, and there are more people living back in there that one might imagine.
Stark contrast between private and public lands in the 2012 Bagley Burn.
Interestingly, much of the Forest Service land here is classified as ‘Roadless’ (yellow), even though it is checkerboarded with heavily roaded private lands…
The Green Fire is in the middle of a large roadless area. Closer inspection in Google Earth shows you why. Crazy limestone geology, and not a lot of big timber. The whole area is also full of rare plants and unique limestone habitats, and is classified as a Research Natural Area. (Devil’s Rock/Hosselkus RNA)
The winds on the fire started to transition to the upcanyon flow around 2 pm. Before noon they were mainly downcanyon, and the smoke was shading out the sun from shining directly on the fire. Small things like this can make a real difference in how intensely a fire burns. Between 2-4pm, the smoke lifted out and the fire could ‘breathe’ fresh air. It burned more intensely, but did not pop up a pyrocumulus cap (column).
Webcam Link – ALERTWest – Round Mtn Shasta 2
Hotter and drier weather is coming, with exceptional heat in the Valley.
The biggest impact of the extreme Valley temps may be to accentuate nighttime downcanyon winds. Thanks to user @norcal74, on the forums.wildfireintel.org website for pointing out/explaining this linkage. This was their reply to a question about weather factors which drive strong downcanyon night winds.
The Green Fire is concerning.. it is on a ridge top which is helping, but the influence of the Pit River drainage could move it out. The Pit is one of the only rivers which can rival Jarbo Gap for down canyon winds, the other being the Chetco.
I think the flow is tied to the differential between the Big Valley area of Bieber and the Sacramento Valley. The diurnal flow pattern is very much tied to differential heating of the valley and the slopes. All canyons experience those types of wind regimes. I think that a few places see enhanced conditions. The Feather being the best example. The Pit River drains all of the NE plateau of water.. and air. As the valley warms and a thermal trough forms air sinks to that area of low pressure. Any air movement down the canyon will be enhanced by that thermal trough formation. I think the Pit is steep enough and large enough to capture and funnel all that falling, cooling and descending air and feed it down into the lake. I do think the lake could certainly play a role as a heat sink as well.. it may very well contribute to the differential heating as water retains heat much better than land.
For the future.. we can see the daily battle on the cameras. I used to tell people that when you fight a fire in the Feather River Canyon.. you really fight two fires.. the one during the day and the other at night.I have been to a few fires in the Pit and it can experience some strong winds at night and in the am. I know there are some folks on here with more experience there than me..
IMHO.. the warming trend next week will increase the gradient differential. When we would see temps reach 100 in the valley (under high pressure and no trough moving into the GB) we would see winds of up to 25 mph in the Feather River Canyon.Looking at the long range the pattern looks to reach triple digits by early next week, so an increase would be expected. What we have seen this year( to date) is a lack of strong and long lived HP cells over the 4 corners. That has led to a very comfortable summer especially at night. That can obviously change.. but we are reaching a peak of summer for heat (climatically). Having been on the Chalk complex in 2009.. that is some really steep country…..
That’s all for now!