Friday, January 3, 2014

Beaver Creek Fire threatened Ketchum and Hailey

Three-week-long blaze was deemed No. 1 priority in U.S.


By GREG MOORE
Express Staff Writer

Photo by Willy Cook

    When a small fire was ignited near Fairfield by one of the many lightning bolts that pounded south-central Idaho on the night of Aug. 7, federal land managers expected it to be a threat primarily to homes and ranchland on the Camas Prairie, and predicted that it would be contained in three days. However, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman said presciently, “Anything can change when we have bad weather.”
    Over the next few days, the weather got about as bad as it gets for feeding a wildfire. Humidity dropped, the temperature soared and the wind began to blow. By the time it was contained at the end of August at a cost of $23 million, the Beaver Creek Fire had scorched 174 square miles of prime recreation land on the west side of the Wood River Valley.
    In one day on Aug. 9, the fire roared north for eight miles, from near the Camas County line to the upper Deer Creek and Warm Springs Creek drainages.
    On Aug. 12, a Type 1 fire management team took over command, based out of a headquarters camp at Peregrine Ranch north of Hailey. Type 1 teams are assigned to fires of the highest priority, and the Beaver Creek Fire was soon named the No. 1 priority fire in the country.
    During a public meeting on the evening of Aug. 14, Incident Commander Beth Lund said she believed there was a “moderate to high probability of success” of keeping the fire out of Greenhorn Gulch, the next drainage north of Deer Creek, but residents there and along the west side of the central Wood River Valley were evacuated just in case.
    The following day, Lund’s words were proved wrong when the fire burned into Imperial Gulch, a side drainage of Greenhorn Gulch.
    “It was a pretty impressive firestorm that came over from the Deer Creek side,” Ketchum District Ranger Kurt Nelson said.
    During the next two days, the fire gobbled up 20,000 acres of forest per day and roared through the residential area of Greenhorn, destroying one house. Through what were widely viewed as heroic efforts, local firefighters saved 30 homes there.
    “The burn during at that time was very, very hot,” incident meteorologist Joe Goudsward said.
    The fire turned the corner north from Greenhorn, and for the second time in six years, Bald Mountain was threatened by wildlire.
    On the night of Aug. 16, fire managers were monitoring the situation in Croy Canyon west of Hailey, not expecting a major run. But the situation deteriorated quickly during the night, and in the early-morning hours of Aug. 17, Hailey residents watched the sky over Carbonate Mountain get redder and redder. At about 2:30 a.m., flames appeared over the ridge and bore down on the town. At the same time, the fire approached the mouth of the canyon, where firefighters set an intentional burn to deprive the fire of fuel.
    The burn worked, and the fire’s advance was stopped at the Big Wood River.
    Over the next two weeks, as the weather gradually began to cooperate, firefighters tamped down the blaze in Deer Creek, Croy Canyon, the upper Warm Springs drainage and in Baker Creek to the northwest of Ketchum. Ketchum itself may have been saved by a buffer area to the west already burned by the Castle Rock Fire—considered a near disaster when it occurred in 2007.
    “Little did we know how fortunate we were as a community to have that fire occur six years before,” Nelson said later.
    But Mother Nature wasn’t done yet. On Sept 2, a 10-year rainstorm dumped three-quarters of an inch of rain in one hour on Croy Creek, Deer Creek and Greenhorn Gulch, sending tons of mud down the hillsides. The normally tiny stream of Deer Creek flowed about 10 feet deep, and portions of homes in Greenhorn were ruined by mud and water.
    Following a burned-area recovery plan, a $1.6 million aerial reseeding and mulching project to reduce erosion and promote plant growth was completed by the Forest Service on Nov. 26 after five days of work.
    The seeding was applied by plane to about 5,900 acres of public land, and straw mulch was dropped by helicopter on about 570 acres in Greenhorn and Imperial gulches. The seeds were a mixture of non-native, sterile rye for short-term erosion control, non-native bunchgrasses expected to outcompete cheatgrass in the early spring and native grasses, forbs and sagebrush to provide long-term forage for wildlife.
    But federal land managers warned that hillsides in the burned areas will remain unstable for the next few years, and recovery and the potential for further damage will depend on the whims of Mother Nature.
Greg Moore: gmoore@mtexpress.com




About Comments

Comments with content that seeks to incite or inflame may be removed.

Comments that are in ALL CAPS may be removed.

Comments that are off-topic or that include profanity or personal attacks, libelous or other inappropriate material may be removed from the site. Entries that are unsigned or contain signatures by someone other than the actual author may be removed. We will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or any other policies governing this site. Use of this system denotes full acceptance of these conditions. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.

The comments below are from the readers of mtexpress.com and in no way represent the views of Express Publishing, Inc.

You may flag individual comments. You may also report an inappropriate or offensive comment by clicking here.

Flagging Comments: Flagging a comment tells a site administrator that a comment is inappropriate. You can find the flag option by pointing the mouse over the comment and clicking the 'Flag' link.

Flagging a comment is only counted once per person, and you won't need to do it multiple times.

Proper Flagging Guidelines: Every site has a different commenting policy - be sure to review the policy for this site before flagging comments. In general these types of comments should be flagged:

  • Spam
  • Ones violating this site's commenting policy
  • Clearly unrelated
  • Personal attacks on others
Comments should not be flagged for:
  • Disagreeing with the content
  • Being in a dispute with the commenter

Popular Comment Threads



 Local Weather 
Search archives:


Copyright © 2024 Express Publishing Inc.   Terms of Use   Privacy Policy
All Rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Express Publishing Inc. is prohibited. 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.