UPDATE – Morning of 7/25/2025
The fire is now well-established in the Saddle Mountain Wilderness. It has not breached the 7/21-7/22 firing operations along the northern boundary of the Park into the Kaibab NF, though it has potential to sneak out of the wilderness back onto the Kaibab from the SE.
The fire grew in all directions except directly south, yesterday.
This map shows last night’s heat, with 24 hours of growth shown from white line.
Green line on north end of the fire is the Park boundary to the Kaibab NF.
Light green line to the NE is Saddle Mountain Wilderness.
7/24/2025 Report
Today’s Lookout Livestream broadcast tracks at the evolution of the Dragon Bravo Fire, which has been burning for nearly 3 weeks in (and now out of) Grand Canyon National Park, in Northern Arizona.
Little Dragon Bravo was initially going to be managed for resource benefits using a ‘confine and contain’ strategy, but the weather and fire made some plans together, and the blaze bolted from the gate and ran a couple miles SE into town, pausing along the way at the water treatment plant to trigger a toxic chlorine gas leak that chased out the firefighters. Free to burn unchecked into a historically-accurate and rich fuelbed of century-in-the-desert-dry cabins and other buildings that have never suffered the gaze of a defensible space inspector, the free-ranging gobbler devoured a priceless historic lodge at the North Rim of the Canyon, along with about 90 other structures.
Since then the fire has consistently back-talked to the professional fire managers brought in to try to keep it in line. When the fire cops tried to snag the subject using a major backfire along the Park Entrance Road a week ago, the insolent blaze refused verbal commands, evaded the fire dogs, and foot-bailed deep into the woods to the east. When they hoped to box it in at the Sublime Point Trail, it chased them out with falling snags and spot fires across their roads.
Undaunted by their previous failures, but feeling the heat (literally) of the quickly-maturing fire setting up for a hard run out of the northeast corner of the park, and battered with a yet-to-subside shitstorm in the National press, the incident management team spun up their drones a couple nights ago and rained ‘Dragon Eggs’ across about 750 acres, lighting an even larger backfire. The northern parts of this Hail Mary are still holding up, but to the east, all this did was piss off the real Dragon, and she is now well-established across about 2,500 acres in the Saddle Mountain Wilderness, and looking to backdoor the Hail Mary firing operation to devil the non-wilderness portions of the Kaibab National Forest, this time, from the SE.
Weather will eventually win this battle, in the end, but in the race between man and monster, my money is on the one with ‘Dragon’ in its name. Hopefully we don’t lose any knights in the battle yet to come.
Lookout Livestream
Forecast is ‘Drier Than a Popcorn Fart’, and breezy.
Amanda Monthei had old-school wildfire historian, Stephen Pyne, on her Life with Fire Podcast to do what he does best – dazzle with words and big thoughts on fire. Pyne spent 15 years as a wildland firefighter on the North Rim, early in his career, and has a good long-view on managing wildfires for resource benefits. Also, his memoir from that time period is a classic.