Fire on the North Rim

It started a couple of weeks ago.  If you had read one of my earlier blogs where I wrote about thunder snow, it was one of the lightning strikes form that storm that started what is now called the Galahad Fire.

It started small and stayed that way for about a week, just a couple hundred acres.  But in the past week it has intensified and grown to almost two thousand acres.  The National Forest Fire Service has been building fire breaks near an historic cabin and fire watch tower and doing ping pong ball napalm drops with helicopters to start back-fires.  Up till now they have not been actively trying to extinguish the fire, just control where it is going as long as it continues to progress as a beneficial fire.

The idea was to keep the fire west of a forest road known as Point Sublime Road (aka W-4).  As long as it stayed there it would burn to the west and toward the edge of the canyon where it would run out of fuel.  But the plan is to begin active fire fighting if it jumps the road and starts coming east, towards the campground.

The fire has approached the road close enough that it is now closed.  It is a pretty popular road with the four-wheeler crowd so there is a bump up in the traffic on the remaining open forest roads to the east as people seek out other places to play.

In the last 48 hours there have been high winds out of the west and it has blown embers across the Fire Service's boundary and started four spot fires.  Up until now the fire was just a nuisance, causing smoke to hang heavy in the trees, burning the eyes and throat.  But now it is getting a little more tense.  Quietly, talk is beginning about evacuation procedures.

But on the bright side, we sure are having some pretty sunsets.  Smoke in the air makes for some really red and orange evening light.

Looking west across the Transept Canyon.

So far, staying isolated and deemed a "beneficiary fire".

On this evening, the wind is in the direction to keep the smoke out of the Grand Canyon

An irony in all this is that the National Park has not banned campfires.  The Forest Service lands all around us have, but not the National Park.  People are still coming into the campground and building, what looks to Cyndee and me as way too large fires.  But the way the wind has been blowing the last few nights, any size fire is too large as far as we are concerned.  And to top it off, we have cleaned out more "hot" fire pits in the last two days than we did in the whole three months of last year's tour of duty.  People are leaving fires burning and just driving away.  There will be no evacuation fast enough if one of our campers lets a fire get away from them.