Canfield Wildfire Controlled Firefighters Mop Up Hot Spots, Patrol Mountain

Firefighters mopped up the last bits of a fire Sunday that had closed Canfield Mountain to the public.

The 30-acre forest fire started Thursday afternoon at the bottom of Dry Gulch along Forest Road 1562, according to the interagency crews fighting the fire. It had been contained Friday and was under control by 8 a.m. Sunday morning, said Frank Waterman, a member of the firefighting crews.

“Contained” means firefighters have a line around the fire and “controlled” means the fire likely won’t be able to spread, he explained.

“They anticipated that it would get really large, and if the weather hadn’t changed, it probably would have,” Waterman said.

Cooler temperatures and higher humidity helped firefighting efforts, said incident commander Jim Colla in a press release.

Only a few firefighters continued to patrol the fire site Sunday, watching to prevent fires from starting from the hot embers, said Kerry Arneson, fire information officer for the crews.

Canfield Mountain, a popular recreation site for dirt biking, mountain biking and off-road vehicles, was closed to the public after the fire started. The Fernan shooting range east of Canfield Mountain also was closed. Officials were reopening the area, including the Fernan shooting range, on Sunday.

Investigators believed a person started the blaze, Waterman said. Steve Galloway of the Idaho Department of Lands is investigating the cause. Anyone with information on how the fire may have started should call the Idaho Department of Lands at (208) 263-5104 or the U.S. Forest Service at (208) 772-3282.

At the height of the fire’s danger, 153 people from several agencies - including Kootenai County Fire Protection District 1, the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Department, the Idaho Department of Lands, the U.S. Forest Service and private and tribal agencies - were working on extinguishing it, Waterman said.

The fire didn’t hurt the forest much at all, said Doug Welbourn of the U.S. Forest Service.

“It did more good than harm,” he said, explaining that the fire killed only a few trees and cleared out brush to allow for more growth next spring. That’s better for wildlife, he said.

“Next spring, it will green right up,” Welbourn said.

Fire danger has been and continues to be high because of dry forest conditions and a lack of rain, officials said in a press release. They encouraged people using the area to follow safe campfire rules and ensure that equipment such as chainsaws have properly installed spark arresters.