Today’s Lookout Livestream
We look at the potential for continued spread of the Green Fire, north of Shasta Lake, the Summit Fire, in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, near the town of Etna, California, and the Butler Fire, east of Somes Bar, on the Salmon River.
Also, we take a first look at the Dragon Bavo Fire, which started as a lightning strike, and was initially managed for ecological benefits before it blew up and destroyed most of the infrastructure at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
View today’s Lookout Livestream, here.
If you just want to watch the Grand Canyon part of today’s livestream, click here.
Scroll down for maps and a summary of today’s report.
Summary of Today’s Episode
We started off the program with a AI-generated folk song about The Lookout, sent to me by Klamath River local, Jake Tripp.
After that, we looked at fresh satellite imagery of the Green and Butler Fires, in Northern California to evaluate the fires’ effects on the vegetation in the recently-burned areas. We talked about progress in containing the Green Fire, and checked out burn patterns in the Butler Fire.
We also looked at an Operations Map of the Green Fire, and talked about how wildfires are staffed, and how to read a wildfire map.
We checked out some on the initial fire modeling which was used to evaluate the potential risks posed by letting the Dragon Bravo Fire burn on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. These models dramatically under-estimated the potential for the fire to reach the developed areas of the North Rim, and after several days of minor spread, the fire blew up and burned over 80 structures there, including a huge old lodge and Visitor Center. Many of the buildings at the North Rim lacked defensible space. We checked out photos of high fire-hazard vegetation conditions directly-adjacent to the burned lodge.
Fire Effects on the Green and Butler Fires
We reviewed 7/15/2025 Sentinel SWIR imagery from European Space Agency for the Green Fire, and looked at a custom Sentinel image for the Butler Fire. The Green Fire is burning mainly as a surface fire, and a very low proportion of the burn shows evidence of torching or crowning.
The Butler Fire shows larger patches of high-severity fire on today’s imagery, but on closer inspection, many of these areas were brush fields before the fire. Many of the areas where mature trees survived the 2013 Butler Fire appear to have had low-moderate severity during this fire.
We had no new information for the Summit Fire.
Fiasco on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon
On July 5th, after lightning sparked a fire about 3 miles NW of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, fire managers decided to manage the new fire for resource benefits. This is a common practice across many Federal lands, especially in the Grand Canyon, which has had one of the most active fire-use programs of any of the West Coast National Parks. The ponderosa pine forests on the North Rim are adapted to frequent fire, and need fire to keep from becoming overcrowded. Historically, low-severity fires killed many of the pine small seedlings which would have otherwise grown into thickets.
It is common practice for fire managers to run predictive models to look at potential near-term fire spread before they make a decision such as this. There is a pretty thorough planning and documentation process that is followed before a fire is allowed to be used to accomplish land management objectives. As part of this planning process, fire managers at the Park Service ran a program called FSPro. This program has been around for about 15 years. It is a probabilistic model, which uses historic weather and fuels conditions to project the potential extent a fire will cover during a given window of time. This initial model run returned a probability of less than 0.2% of the fire reaching the developed areas of the North Rim. Here is the map-output from that model run.
The fire didn’t grow much for several days, and then around the 10th of July, it grew substantially, and by the 13th, it had reached the developed areas and caused enormous damage. Watch the Lookout Livestream, above, for more of our thoughts on what this means for the Park Service’s Managed Fire Programs.
We also looked at photos from the internet which show the enormous fuel loading directly adjacent to the Lodge, commenting that if the building was privately-owned, it would be un-insurable, given the hazards posed by the vegetation.
We reviewed satellite imagery of the Dragon Bravo Fire’s initial fire effects. Much of the area burned so far seems to still have green trees standing. It is hard to tell from initial imagery how many of these trees will die in the next year or two, but the burn appears to have spread with a mosaic of fire effects, as is typical in this type of forest. The as-of-yet unburned area in the lower-left had a wildfire in 2022. Red areas lack a forest canopy after the fire. Some of the red areas where fairly scrubby and open before the fire.
We’ll have more on this story. I want to be clear that I am not letting people off the hook for making decisions that led to this disaster. However, I do support the use of fire to manage lands, and sometimes this is possible even during summer. We’ll look forward to the investigation of this incident, and will report on what is discovered.
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