The Beulah Fire has grown to 3,352 acres, fire officials said Tuesday morning, and is still at 0% containment.
The fire, which started Thursday, is burning in heavy timber in the High Uintas Wilderness about 7.5 miles southeast of the Bear River Ranger Station on Highway 15, making short crown runs while sending embers that start spot fires ahead of the blaze.
The fire area has experienced critical fire weather nearing Red Flag criteria for high winds and low relative humidity, and the vegetation in the area is extremely dry with fuel moisture conditions at critically low levels. Visible smoke is primarily due to the burning of dead and down fuels rather than increased fire spread or movement, officials said, and firefighters are observing erratic and extreme fire behavior, they said.
Four scooper planes and nine helicopters are now working on full suppression efforts, as well as 390 personnel in from across Colorado, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. The Great Basin Team 4, a Complex Incident Management Team, took over command Monday morning due to the fire’s particular challenges.
“The hosting agency, which in this case is the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest … (will) look at several different factors when they’re trying to make a decision about the level of need for the fire,” said Lisa Wilkolak, public information officer with the Great Basin Team 4. “What are the values at risk? Are there a lot of communities involved? What level of response do we need to be able to do? If we’re required to do closures or evacuations or anything like that.”
As the incident grows more complex, better-equipped teams will be ordered to step in, she explained. With the Great Basin Team 4 comes additional resources, anything from crews and hoses to catering companies and handwash stations.
“It’s a multi-layered analysis of everything, and it includes the local levels making a decision, and then our national level already-in-place system that can support the requests that then will start coming in from the complex team,” Wilkolak said.
The team also brings their incident meteorologists who monitor fire weather forecasts. As of Tuesday morning, they anticipated a possible weather shift coming on Wednesday, bringing the potential for several days of thunderstorms.
Officials said firefighter and public safety remain the No. 1 priority. With the fire burning in inaccessible steep, rocky terrain, crews are doing structure preparations and fuels reduction work to reduce or eliminate risks to any communities, infrastructure, recreation and cultural resources, Wilkolak said.
“If the fire were to come outside of the wilderness and head toward, for example, the Hinckley scout camp or another area that’s populated or has denser vegetation, they are preparing (those) areas that are not directly on the fire line,” Wilkolak said.
Clearing vegetation along roadways, setting up water handling and sprinkler systems, and scouting routes for potential containment lines are part of those efforts, she said.
“Every roadway that they’re able to, they will remove some of the heavy dead and down fuels that are along the roadway, so that if they need to use that road in the future as a line to fight the fire, they would have a pretty safe buffer,” she said.
For direct attack, air resources are collecting and dropping water on the blaze, which as of Tuesday involved four scooper planes based out of Provo and nine helicopters. Scoopers are filling up from Strawberry Reservoir, and by Monday morning had dropped 142,000 gallons of water on the fire. On Sunday, a type 1 helicopter — the largest helicopter with the greatest capacity to assist firefighters working on the ground — had dropped 36,000 gallons of water.
“Our air operations will work with other fires in the region,” said Wilkolak. “If there’s a determination that a new fire has a greater need than we do for an aerial resource, whether it’s the scoopers or one of the helicopters or something, they will share those resources with other fires.”
The Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest issued a closure order for areas surrounding the fire. Closed campgrounds included Christmas Meadows, Lily Lake and North Slope. Trailhead closures included East Fork Bear River, West Fork Blacks Fork, Middle Fork Blacks Fork, East Fork Blacks Fork, Cache, and Highline. Other trailhead closures included Hell Hole Lake, which is closed via access from Christmas Meadows but remains accessible from Gold Hill Road, East Fork Blacks Fork, Little Lyman Lake and the Lily Lake dump station.
Stage 1 fire restrictions have been imposed for the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache and Ashley national forests while Stage 2 fire restrictions remain in place on all other Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and state land in Utah.
The Beulah Fire is the largest fire in Summit County during the 2025 season. In 2024, the Yellow Lake Fire burned over 30,000 acres in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest, east of Francis.
A community meeting will be held Tuesday evening at 7 p.m. at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 14864 WY-150 (off Mirror Lake Highway) in Evanston, Wyoming, and the recorded live stream can be found on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest Facebook page at facebook.com/USFSUWCNF.
The cause of the wildfire is still under investigation.