Fire Season in the NW

[hambone]

Which is weird because it's been unseasonably raining in Portland for days.

[spiffy]

Man, most of those are really remote areas. Wonder if it was lightning that sparked em or the 'numbnuts'?

[MeyerII]

I understand alot of them were natural.

We hit the tripod fire outside of Winthrop last year. The fire was big enough to create its own weather. Here's a picture we took:

[Westy78]

Most of those were caused by dry lightning I think. What was it, last Friday that the T-storms came through here? They rolled straight north up the Cascades.

[Emily's Owner]

Jasan's right - On our drive to Pendleton down I-84 last Friday, you could see fires on both sides of the Columbia around Boardman (where Potlatch has it's trees). And saw a few blackened wheat fields around Athena as we drove there on Saturday. The rain really hasn't fallen enough on the other side of the Cascade Range to really make a difference. We wouldn't let the kids have even sparklers on the 4th of July at the ranch it was so dry, didn't want to spark off 1000 acres of wheat...

[turk]

I've been told many fires in the intermountain west are lightning-caused but they are starting a bit earlier nowadays and they last longer too (the fire season that is). This is caused in part by cheatgrass which is a eurasian exotic invader spread primarily by disturbance of the sagebrush steppe by cattle. Once cheatgrass colonizes an area disturbed by the cattle's hooves it is very hard for native grasses, which have deeper roots, to grow. The cheatgrass, which everyone has probably seen (it is everywhere in the U.S.) has shallow roots, and absorbs most of the spring moisture from the top soil; and it then goes to seed in the early summer, then dies and becomes tinder for lightning, leaving a dry barren topsoil which it easily recolonizes over the winter thus outcompeting the slower growing native grasses and sagebrush which need time to grow thier roots in the moist topsoil. It's a disaster we are witnessing. Much sagebrush steppe will become a barren wasteland in our lifetimes because of the BLM's policy of rancher welfare.

[PDX_Hops]

This is always an interesting time of year for my brother, who works for the US Forest Service. He lives in Arkansas right now, but during fire season, they pull resources from all over the country to fight fires in the busiest areas. He's over in Madras, OR right now.