There is a new fire burning in the Bull of the Woods which apparently started today. See photos 1, 2, 3. All photos were taken this afternoon between 4:30 and 5:45 as I was heading home from the Elk Lake Creek trail. The first photo was taken from Road 63 above the upper Collawash River. I had noticed a lot of smoke building along a ridge west of Schreiner Peak, but I didn't take a picture of it. As I went further down the road, I saw that the smoke was forming a large column, and that's when I got out my camera. When I got up to Graham Pass (photo 2) the smoke column had grown significantly and was blocking the sun. I took the road up to Mt Lowe to get a better view (photo 3) and could see that the fire seemed to be spreading along the ridge. I'm not sure of the location. Could be Dickey Creek or Pansy Basin. Wherever it is, it grew quickly and looks like a bad fire.
I tried calling the Forest Service to report it when I got home at 7:30, but could find no way to get in touch with anyone nor any way to even leave a voice message. I guess they only care about fires that occur during working hours.
That looks like the makings of a bad fire.
You probably should've called 911. They would put you in touch with the proper District authorities.
According to the NW Interagency Coordination Center, it's called the Lake Lenore fire. Lightening caused, burning on steep, inaccessible slopes, about 550 acres.
Hope the immediate area around the lake doesn't get torched.
I can't help wondering about the origin of this fire. If it was lightning caused, it sure didn't happen on Tuesday, when I first saw it. There was a clear blue sky in that area all day, with only some light, thin clouds in the west in the afternoon. When I was driving in on the Graham Pass road that morning, I stopped to look over in that direction. I had been looking at topo maps at home and wanted to match the peaks in the BOW with what I saw on the maps. There was no smoke evident at that time, and I'm pretty darned sure that there was no lightning during the day.
Is is possible that this is a reigniting of the small fires that I noted in this post from Aug. 19? There was quite a bit of rain in the following days, which may have dampened but not entirely extinguished one or more of those fires. It seems like if something continued to smolder after all that rain, that it could have started burning again well before now. But I suppose the reawakening of the Gnarl Ridge fire blows that theory away. Maybe it was the low humidity of the past few days that gave it the edge it needed to reignite. In any event, the location of the current fire certainly seems to match the location of the fires I saw up there a month ago.
