Utah’s wildfire season is well underway, and this year’s fires have already blackened more than four times the amount of land that had been burned at the same point last year.
Fires are measured in acreage burned, and so far this year, they’ve covered 270,455 acres across 388 blazes. One acre is about the size of a football field, and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado is nearly 266,000 acres.
We put together an interactive map so you can see how Utah’s burn scar grew in June. The map combines the total burned acreage and compares it with a map of Salt Lake City.
On June 3, the first day state fire officials published their weekly “Wildfire Wednesday” update, fires had burned 8,400 acres across the Beehive State. That’s larger than the entire property the Salt Lake City airport is situated on, which measures about 8,044 acres.
By June 10, fires had consumed 11,900 acres — nearly the size of the skiable area at Powder Mountain Ski Resort, which covers 12,850 acres of slopes and is one of the largest ski resorts in North America.
A week later, on June 17, fires had scorched around 13,300 acres. That’s about 90% of the size of Manhattan, which covers some 14,600 acres.
By June 25, Utah wildfires ballooned to 105,000 acres, which is almost 1.5 times the size of Arches National Park. The park covers about 76,500 acres, according to the National Park Service.
At that point, six large fires were burning across Utah — including the Cottonwood Fire near Beaver, the Iron Fire near Eureka, the Hastings Fire in Tooele County, the Sawmill Fire in Iron County, the Bonneville Fire in Salt Lake City and the Dutchman Fire in Utah County,
On Monday, wildfire sizes had more than doubled to over 270,000 acres, larger than Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado by about 4,000 acres. Nine new fires added 112,000 acres to the previous week’s total.

Jordan Miller
Jordan is a breaking news reporter at The Tribune. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma and has written for the Houston Chronicle along with the Enid News & Eagle. When she's not reporting, she loves watching football, reading books and painting.