UPDATE: Fires in HCNRA grown to 11,500 acres

Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Three lightning-caused fires burning in the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area (HCNRA) in Wallowa County had grown to approximately 11,500 acres by 9 a.m. Thursday.

The trio of fires form what has been named the Tryon Creek Complex. They are the Haas Ridge Fire, put at 1,702 acres in the latest estimate; Tryon Fire, 6,954 acres; and Cherry Creek Fire, 2,765 acres. The Cherry Creek Fire is the closest to Imnaha and is about 20 miles north of that small canyon community.

The Blue Mountain Interagency Fire Team has set up camp at the Joseph rodeo grounds, with Nick Lunde of Joseph, a fire officer with the U.S. Forest Service, in charge as incident commander.

As of Thursday morning there were 447 fire personnel, 10 engines and five helicopters working on the fire complex. With fire resources spread thin all over the Western U.S. more equipment and firefighters were continuing to arrive at the camp, which was set up Tuesday.

“I cannot estimate a containment date,” Lunde said Thursday. “We’re dealing with three fires, and we are concentrating our resources on protecting structures rather than containing the perimeter.” He said at this point most of the suppression effort is concentrated on the Haas Ridge Fire, with some personnel also located near structures on Cherry Creek and Tryon, has burned down to the river.

At a special meeting Thursday morning, the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners ordered the Dug Bar Road closed at Fence Creek about six miles below Imnaha, the point where the pavement ends.

“There’s a lot of fire traffic and we don’t want it to be any more risky than it needs to be,” said board of commission chairman Mike Hayward.

“It sounds like they are doing a good job with what resources they have,” said Hayward of the firefighting effort. He added that he was happy to see Lunde named as incident commander. “It’s good to know someone who knows the country and people is in charge. It’s nice to have a local guy in that position.

“It’s mostly grass in very rugged country,” said information officer Steve Butterworth of Seattle, Wash., about the terrain in which the fires are burning. “What they call roads are … cow trails,” he said, using a phrase supplied by long-time Imnaha resident Chris Moore, who started Thursday morning on the information staff. She said that she has been receiving a lot of calls from Imnaha area residents wanting to know what is going on, but noted that no one is too worried yet. “We’ve had fires closer to Imnaha,” she said.

A community information meeting was scheduled at the Imnaha Christian Fellowship Church at 2 p.m. Thursday.

“More and more people are arriving from all over,” Butterworth said. Hot shot crews have already arrived from California and the Navaho Indian Reservation in Arizona, and La Grande and Union hot shot crews — which have been in a rest period between fires — are expected to join the effort in the near future.

He said that there is “no break from Mother Nature” in the form of rain expected in the near future, but on the other hand there was no forecast for more lightning storms, either.

While it’s too early for any containment estimate, Butterworth said the hope is to hold the fires down to below 89,000 acres “as a worst case scenario.”

Lightning sparks Imnaha firesA pair of lightning-sparked, fast-moving grass and brush fires in the lower Imnaha River canyon will likely grow to fair size before finally being contained, said Bob Both of the United States Forest Service Fire Office on Tuesday.

Those in the Joseph area will have noticed helicopters filling buckets for aerial drops, and the Blue Mountain Incident Management Team (BMIMT) has been called in to deal with the blazes.

The first fire is located on Haas Ridge between Horse Creek and Lightning Creek on the lower Imnaha and is roughly 300 acres in size, Both said. The Oregon Department of Forestry has a bulldozer on site at this point making contingency lines, though the fire will be difficult to contain until it gets out of the rough canyon terrain.

“We’ve had a fire near there in 2003 that went 17,000 acres,” Both said. “It’s on a spot you can’t reach until it gets down to the benches.”

The second fire is near Tryon Creek along the Snake River and is currently at about 700 acres. “The Tryon fire could go 40,000 to 100,000 acres depending on the weather,” Both said. Canyon fires “generally burn from river to rim and we pinch them off north and south wherever we can.”

Right now “there are not a lot of resources on either fire,” Both said. “We’re working them with buckets.”

A lightning storm Sunday morning around 3 a.m. started about 15 small fires from Sled Springs to Buckhorn, all of which have been contained and mopped up, Both said, while the two fires in the hard-to-reach canyon areas “got a head start.”

The BMIMT will be setting up its headquarters on the Joseph rodeo grounds Tuesday, and will begin dealing with the two fires in earnest shortly thereafter.

Both said that while there were no road closures as yet, lower Imnaha River valley roads might close in order to get resources in should the Haas fire increase in size.