Historic fire season; Snow snuffs busy fire season in northeast Wyoming

BUFFALO — After a year of record moisture in 2023, northeast Wyoming was ready to burn. And burn it did.

Rain and snow fell early last year, resulting in grass growth. Without heavy snowpack this past winter to knock the blades down, vegetation cured and dried heading into summer. Come August, all the range needed was an ignition source and some wind to create a landscape level fire.

With his 24 years of fire experience in the region, Craig Short said both the number of fires and the acres burned here are “unprecedented.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” said Short, the Bureau of Land Management’s fire management officer for the High Plains District. The district includes Johnson, Sheridan, Campbell, Converse, Crook, Goshen, Natrona, Niobrara, Platte and Weston counties.

A new airtanker base at Casper-Natrona County International Airport that opened this summer was well-timed. Short said that the planes dropped more than 829,000 gallons, or 460 loads, of fire retardant in Wyoming and neighboring states.

While unprecedented, local fire managers weren’t necessarily surprised by the fire activity in Johnson and surrounding counties. Conditions that factor into fire behavior – wind, relative humidity, fuel load, fuel moisture, temperature – lined up to create ideal conditions for wildfires.

“If we didn’t have lightning – had rain — we wouldn’t see this behavior,” said Jacob McCarthy, Wyoming State Forestry’s District 5 forester. “But we had lightning, we had wind – that factor that we can’t control – grass fuels, it just moved at an extraordinary rate.”

McCarthy’s District 5 covers Johnson, Sheridan and Campbell counties, all of which saw extensive fire activity, including the House Draw complex at the end of August into September.

House Draw fire

The House Draw fire burned 174,547 acres in eastern Johnson County from Clearmont to Kaycee at the end of August.

Sparked by a lightning strike, the fire jumped Interstate 90 and burned most of its acreage in fewer than 24 hours. Short said that the fire was initially moving north, when an overnight cold front pushed it south.

“It takes some time to get resources down there, compounded with the other fires starting in northeast Wyoming,” he said.

Todd Yeager, manager of the BLM Buffalo Field Office covering Johnson, Sheridan and Campbell counties, said that fires this year were particularly active at night.

“This night activity of fire, we typically don’t see,” he said. “A lot of times, they lay down, they don’t grow at night. These fires are picking up and moving at night.”

In the aftermath of the House Draw fire, roughly three dozen landowners, many of them agricultural producers, lost rangeland and ranch infrastructure, including a collective 590 miles of fencing, which the Johnson County Commission estimated could cost $11.8 million to replace. Scorched sagebrush leaves a dearth of habitat for species such as Greater Sage-Grouse and mule deer. Post-fire treatment to prevent invasive vegetation growth could cost as much as $13 million for herbicide and its application.

Suppression costs, split among several land management agencies and covered in part by a Federal Emergency Management Agency emergency declaration, surpassed $6 million for the House Draw fire alone.

And as the House Draw fire burned, a complex incident management team managed it and four additional fires in Campbell and Sheridan counties and into Montana.

Wyoming State Forester Kelly Norris testified to the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Agriculture, State and Public Lands Committee on Sept. 11 on the extraordinary costs of this year’s fire season. She said at the time that State Forestry counts 17 fires, which will cost the state $30 million from its Emergency Fire Suppression Account.

Norris gave this testimony before the Elk fire ignited on the Bighorn National Forest, which went on to burn 96,179 mostly forested acres in Sheridan County.

The overall suppression costs on that fire have topped $50 million, according to Matt Weakland, the Powder River Ranger District’s fire management officer.

Elk fire

Dispatch data show that the forest had seen few large fires in the past decade up until this year. The last thousand-plus acre fire was the Crater Ridge fire in 2021 that burned 7,684 acres.

In 2024, the Bighorn National Forest saw 19 fires. Most of those were kept under an acre, save for the Elk fire that brought more than 1,000 fire personnel to camps in Dayton and made national news headlines.

Prior to the Elk fire, the largest recorded fire on the forest was the Lost fire of 1988, which burned roughly 18,000 acres.

Managers estimated that between 1890 and 1910, a large fire wiped out much of the Bighorn National Forest. Much of the forest ecosystem is 80 to 120 years old.

“That means a lot of our forest is actually very mature and at its typical lifespan,” Weakland said. “Our Bighorn National Forest is very primed for incidents like this.”

The Elk fire burned quickly, roughly 25,000 acres in just a day. Low relative humidity, high winds and cold front passages generally drove the fire, Weakland said.

The fire also came after a freeze event in early September. Altogether, these atypical conditions “makes things explosive,” he said.

“Your conifer trees, deciduous brush, forage, grass, everything was fully dormant,” Weakland said. “There was no live fuel moisture, so that just made everything that much more available to burn.”

Fire activity on the forest was minimal outside of the Elk fire.

Crews responded to a roughly one acre fire in the Bud Love area over the weekend, according to the forest’s Facebook page. The social media post says that the cause, at this point, is undetermined. It was quickly declared controlled and out, as snow and light fuels limited the fire’s spread.

While BLM, state and county lands have been under fire restrictions since early summer, the forest banned campfires for just a short stint during the Elk fire.

“We were evaluating fuels conditions on the forest all summer long, and we never really got up into that overly concerning fuel condition,” Weakland said, referring to staff’s regular testing of fuel moisture. “And we weren’t having a problem with people leaving campfires that needed to be dealt with. So there wasn’t a need to move into restrictions.”

In early November, both the Bighorn Mountains and the lower elevation Powder River Basin have seen both snow and rainfall. The National Interagency Fire Center outlook for November and December shows that the southeastern U.S. has significant wildfire potential, giving the Mountain West a much-needed reprieve.

Local fire managers highlighted the level of cooperation between counties, federal and state agencies, local volunteer fire departments, and private landowners who lent equipment and manpower throughout the season, as a positive aspect of the active fire season in northeast Wyoming.

“We’re blessed in this part of the state of Wyoming – I think overall in Wyoming – that we work really, really well together,” McCarthy said. “We understand the need to be on the same team. That’s really important.”

This story was published on November 14, 2024.