Utah’s largest 2023 wildfire yet still burning in Fishlake National Forest

The largest wildfire yet of Utah’s current fire season continues to burn with little containment in public lands southeast of Beaver, but fire crews are hopeful that forecast rain and low humidity will help them extinguish the blaze.

A lightning strike caused the Thompson Ridge Fire on Aug. 4, but Great Basin incident management team spokesperson Sierra Hellstrom said the weather has otherwise cooperated with teams’ efforts to put it out.

Rain has fallen on the fire most days since crews arrived last Thursday, she said, and cloud coverage has kept temperatures cool. Crews were on the lookout for increased winds Tuesday, which could increase fire activity.

As of Tuesday morning, the fire had spread to 7,289 acres and was 15% contained. Much of southern Fishlake National Forest remains closed through Oct. 1, according to a U.S. Forest Service order. Officials have not issued any evacuation orders, and nearby campgrounds — such as Anderson Meadow, Lebaron and Kent’s Lake — remained open as of Tuesday.

This is Utah’s largest wildfire of the season, Hellstrom said, partly because of luck and crews catching fires before they grew larger, and partly because the wet winter pushed fire season back about a month.

While wet conditions slowed the fire, Hellstrom said, the precipitation has also made already steep, challenging and fuel-laden terrain more difficult to access for firefighters on foot.

Colter Coates, Great Basin operations section chief, said at a Monday community briefing that crews had contained the east side of the fire, near Birch Creek, where a gas line runs along the fire’s edge. “That fire isn’t posing any threat,” he said.

While the southern part of the fire is also mostly under control — albeit some hot spots remain and it isn’t totally contained — the northwestern side of the fire, near Thompson Creek, is “just unsafe to put people in there” because of steep terrain and the ongoing fire.

“If anybody got hurt,” Coates said, “we would never be able to get them out.”

Coates said crews have backed off and are building a fire break at the top of the ridge line northwest of the fire line.

“So that if and when the fire moves that direction, and doesn’t hold throughout the next few days, that we’re prepared for the conflict,” Hellstrom said.

No structures are threatened by this fire, Hellstrom said, but areas of concern are the nearby campgrounds and two Beaver subdivisions: Hi-Lo Estates and Arrowhead.

Coates said that while the rain will calm flames and restrict movement, firefighters know the wet weather won’t last and wind will pick up.

“So we’re doing everything we can to try and button that up so when it does dry out and we get the wind to come back,” he said, “we don’t have anything coming out and we actually have a control line we can work on.”

Great Basin incident commander Trent Ingram reiterated the danger crews are facing on Monday evening, saying people have died doing this work, and that’s why they were not able to extinguish it at its source before it spread. His team was in Canada earlier this summer, he said, where firefighters have recently died.

“When they first saw this fire small — access, safety, putting people in there just wasn’t possible,” Ingram said.

Hellstrom encouraged visitors to stay out of closure areas to keep themselves and fire crews safe.

“We just want to remind the public that just because there isn’t smoke in the air, that there is still an active fire,” she said.

Utah Wildfire Info showed there were six other fires burning in the state as of Tuesday morning. The largest of those was an 11-acre blaze near Emery.