Much of October was a smoky existence along the Wasatch Back while the largest wildfire of the year in Utah burned 33,000 acres of national forest laced with beetle-killed timber east of Francis almost to Hanna.
Before unseasonably warm and dry weather gave way to snow, the Yellow Lake Fire burned for a month and a half, from Sept. 28 to Nov. 12. But inside the fire perimeter, nearly 7,300 acres did not burn at all, and no structures burned, either.
“That was because of where it was, and the weather patterns during the fire,” said Ken Verboncoeur, the Heber-Kamas district ranger for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest.
The structures most endangered were at the Piute Camp for girls in the Soapstone Basin, about three and half miles south of the Soapstone Campground along Mirror Lake Highway. This recreational camp was surrounded by fire for several days, but firefighters were able to clear vegetation and fire fuels from around the camp’s buildings and air tankers saved all of camp structures by dumping red fire retardant directly on the camp buildings.
Another area of concern was the many private homes along the North Fork of the Duchesne River near the community of Hanna.
“We had resources that were doing protection cuts all around there try to minimize the fire burning across the river,” Verboncoeur said. All the homes were saved.
At the height of the fire in early October, Yellow Lake was the No. 1 priority fire in the United States for a two-day stretch. Up to 840 firefighters were assigned to the incident, on one of those days there were three jumbo-jet air tankers dumping retardant and five super-scooper planes flying laps all day across Strawberry Reservoir and dumping lake water on the fire, five additional tankers, and two heavy lift helicopters. Over 680,000 gallons of retardant and 2.2 million gallons of water were dropped in total on the fire zone.
Early on, the fire was determined to be human caused along the Duchesne Ridge south and east of Mill Hollow reservoir. The final report detailing the incident and the cause is still being prepared by the Forest Service. Several media outlets reported that the fire started in an area of logging operations about four miles south of S.R. 35.
So far, the Forest Service has not noticed any significant loss of wildlife in the fire zone. Because the area has numerous patches of meadows and open areas with little or no trees, and the fire was largely a patchy or mosiaic pattern, the belief is that animals used these open areas as safe zones.
Numerous firefighters reported seeing large numbers of moose, elk and deer escaping the fire and one firefighter even reported that he had been tracked by a bear for the better part of a day.
Most of the fire zone remains closed to the public, largely due to so many blackened tree snags on the brink of falling over and potentially striking someone. Many roads and trails have fallen trees across them and will eventually need to be cleared by Forest Service teams once the snow depth allows.
“We’ll shrink that closure down to areas where the public can get in there, either it’s on trails or certainly snowmobile access,” Verboncoeur said. “I know it is a hot topic. I think in the next month we will be able to shrink the closure down.”
But they’ll keep some areas closed “just because of the dangers of trees coming down,” he said.
For the next couple of years, aspen will likely flourish in the burned areas because of their natural underground network of root systems, which allows them to regenerate. Aspen, a fire resistant species, will have little competition from other trees more vulnerable to fire. For fall color leaf peepers, this could be a bonanza in the coming years.
Connor Gardia, assistant fire management officer for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, said this fire was not all bad.
“You want diversity (of vegetation species) in a mosaic pattern, resetting the landscape. You don’t want all 20-year-old trees, and you don’t want all 100-year-old trees,” he said. Because the fire was spotty and mosaic-like, the burned areas will sprout new young trees and ground vegetation and just a few yards away will be a mature stand of existing older unaffected trees, creating a more diverse forest.
On the northern perimeter of the fire along Mirror Lake Highway, the fire never got close enough to create any serious concern of it crossing the corridor. The highway was closed at one point as a safety precaution.
Over the years, the Forest Service has been thinning trees along the highway to create a fire break that would eliminate ladder fuels, keeping fire out of the canopy, making it easier to stop.
In the spring, depending on how fast the snow melt happens, watershed areas will see ash and soot draining into the Provo River. How that impacts the water quality will be determined next summer.
In the next couple of years, the Forest Service teams will begin the process of reforestation, with the mission being to create a wide diversity of trees in the burn areas.