This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Utah is on track for one of its quieter wildfire seasons, despite fears of an ugly one as the mostly barren, warm winter drew to a close.
So far this year, Utah wildfires have scorched a total of about 27,800 acres. If that sounds like a lot, 70,000 acres burned up in 2013, and 415,000 acres burned in 2012, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
A few scares have popped up this year, like the Scipio Summit Fire in early July, and a quickly doused blaze that threatened condos near Jordanelle Reservoir in late July. But taking the whole state into account, things look a lot like last year, when fires burned up about 28,000 acres.
Totals like those make this year and last the quietest wildfire seasons for the state since 2008, which had similar figures.
Utah's current mild summer stands in especially stark contrast to the wildfires roaring elsewhere throughout the United States. Nationally, wilderness blazes have burned more than 9,300 square miles so far this year, which is about 50 percent above average. The U.S. Forest Service announced Thursday that it is spending more than 50 percent of its budget to suppress the nation's wildfires.
And if Utah's weather forecast holds true, the rest of the summer could stay fairly quiet, too. The Climate Prediction Center forecasts that August will be slightly cooler and wetter than normal.
"Hoping that bears true, the fire season will continue to be fairly mild," said Jason Curry, spokesman for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands.
Still, experts like Curry don't want people growing complacent.
"August can always have a few surprises," said Shelby Law, a Bureau of Land Management meteorologist. "Certainly, we could experience a period of hot, dry weather again towards the middle to end of the month… [so we] might see our fire danger increase to normal to above normal."
Fire officials would not have predicted this mild season at the start of 2015, though.
The warm, dry winter had fire officials on edge. Fueling that anxiety, a number of grass fires popped up in February, one growing to 120 acres. The BLM hired 15 percent more seasonal firefighters. The North Summit Fire District, which battled the destructive Rockport 5 fire in 2013, started training for the wildfire season a month or two ahead of schedule.
But come May, unusually heavy downpours doused those fears.
As Law predicted earlier this year, the heavy rains and an average monsoon season delayed any significant wildfires through June and July. Even the timber in the higher elevations — which was said in April to be too far gone to recuperate — benefited.
The Wasatch Front can expect highs in the upper 80s for at least the first half of next week, and St. George will see highs in the mid to upper 90s, according to the National Weather Service.
— The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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