Wildfires continue to burn in region
Washington
Fire crews were working Wednesday to protect summer cabins in north-central Washington’s Chewuch Valley after two large wildfires burned together and continued to grow.
The Tripod and Spur Peak fires have burned more than 74,800 acres, or nearly 117 square miles, of national forest land northeast of Winthrop. The fires, which burned together on Tuesday, began spreading into the Loomis State Forest this week, but the blaze remained about 8 miles southwest of the town of Loomis, fire information officer Tom James said.
About 450 people live in Loomis, about 10 miles south of the Canadian border.
“We do have containment lines between the fire and the town,” James said. “The weather has been looking pretty good, the humidity is up and the temperature is down a little bit. The winds have been fairly calm today as well, so things are looking pretty calm.”
Nearly 2,100 firefighters were assigned to the blaze, which was 10 percent contained.
In central Washington, the Flick Creek fire near Stehekin on Lake Chelan was 30 percent contained at 4,200 acres, or about 6.5 square miles. Only a dozen firefighters remained on the fire.
Fire crews were continuing trail protection efforts along the Entiat River to protect against the Tinpan fire, which has burned 4,100 acres about 40 miles northwest of Entiat. About 242 fire personnel were working the blaze, which was being allowed to burn inside established boundaries. Longview Fibre Co. on Wednesday closed all of its timberlands in Chelan County to public recreation because of extreme fire danger. West of the Cascade Range, the Bear Gulch II fire was estimated at 400 acres between Lake Cushman and Mount Rose, north of Shelton. The fire was 25 percent contained.
Idaho
New timber fires are stretching crews who have been battling dozens of blazes in the rugged Idaho backcountry. On Wednesday, one of those blazes, the Boundary fire, closed a launching point for rafters on the popular Middle Fork of the Salmon River.
The Boundary fire is one of 29 blazes sparked Tuesday in the Salmon-Challis National Forest by a band of dry lightning storms.
Crews quickly snuffed out some of the blazes, while they circled several others, but the Boundary fire remained nettlesome.
Forest managers closed a road to a northern launching spot on the Middle Fork – four days before its seasonal closing date on Sunday – and evacuated a campground in the area, said Kent Fuellenbach, a Salmon-Challis spokesman.
An eight-person team of smokejumpers parachuted into the fire area late Tuesday, but a wall of flames and erratic winds hampered the crew’s ability to stake a camp, Fuellenbach said. Crews will fight the blaze with aerial water drops until a ground team can move in, he said.
Another new blaze, the Garden Creek fire, was burning about 20 miles from the remote village of North Fork. It made runs up densely forested slopes on Wednesday and threatened to torch a historic Forest Service fire lookout.
“It’s been so busy in dispatch, just moving resources around,” Fuellenbach said. “We’re talking about a forest here that is 4.3 million acres.”
Also in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, brisk gusts pushed the Potato fire into three new square miles of rugged forest, raising the total area burned to almost 14 square miles.