Wind fans Eagle Cap wildfire

The rapid, and unexpected, advance of the Big Sheep Ridge fire prompted Forest Service officials, who had mainly been watching rather than fighting the blaze since lightning sparked it in the Eagle Cap Wilderness on Aug. 29, to call in more than 150 firefighters and three helicopters.

Firefighters will be aided by the weather — snow fell in the area Tuesday night.

RY Timber’s 11,000-acre parcel is about one-quarter mile from the fire, company forester Bruce Dunn said this morning.

The fire is several miles southwest of Lostine.

Dunn said that although he appreciates the Forest Service’s quick response to the fire’s exponential growth on Monday, he intends to discuss with agency officials their policy of letting certain fires burn in the wilderness.

“I think the wilderness let-burn policy is the only way you can do business, but let’s learn from what we’ve done here,” Dunn said.

At an estimated 3,000 acres, the Big Sheep Ridge blaze is the biggest “wildland fire use” — WFU, a term the Forest Service uses for lightning-caused blazes that are allowed to burn — in the Eagle Cap Wilderness since the Forest Service started allowing such fires there about 20 years ago.

At least one WFU has burned in the Eagle Cap, which is Oregon’s largest wilderness at 361,000 acres, in each of the past seven summers.

The largest previous blaze burned about 470 acres in 2003.

Fire officials say WFUs generally help rather than hurt the forest.

One of their biggest benefits is ridding the woods of limbs, needles and other burnable debris that, if left to accumulate over many decades, could fuel an abnormally hot conflagration that sterilizes the soil.

The Wallowa-Whitman allows WFUs in the Eagle Cap and in parts of the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.

The forest used to allow such fires in portions of the Elkhorn Mountains west of  Baker City, too.

But there hasn’t been an WFU in the Elkhorns since 1996, when the Sloans Ridge fire exploded on a 90-degree August day and over the next week burned 10,500 acres, including more than 100 acres of private land.

The Forest Service settled a damage claim with the landowners for $250,000.

Steve Ellis, supervisor of the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, said Tuesday afternoon that he believes crews will prevent a repeat of Sloans Ridge and confine the Big Sheep Ridge fire to public land.

“We have lots of resources, and the weather’s on our side,” Ellis said.

The weather was on the fire’s side Monday.

Humidities plummeted to 3 percent — drier than lumber that’s been cured in a kiln.

South winds in advance of a cold front gusted as fast as 50 mph.

“Monday was probably the most extreme fire weather we’ve had all summer — and it happened on September 28,” Ellis said.

That’s almost a week after summer officially ended.

“The fire moved just over six miles in six hours,” Ellis said. “It’s a very long, skinny fire.”

Before Monday it was neither, having burned about 100 acres.

Fire officials expected dry, blustery weather on Monday — those conditions had been forecast since late last week.

What they didn’t expect, Ellis said, is that the fire would jump a half-mile-wide area that was burned during a pair of previous blazes, one of them earlier this year.

Those two fires burned most of the trees within their boundaries, creating a firebreak that had helped to confine the Big Sheep Ridge blaze since it started a month ago.

But on Monday winds were sufficiently powerful to propel embers past the already burned areas and drop the hot coals into thickets of subalpine firs, Ellis said.

Subalpine firs are known as the “Roman candles” of the forest, he said — the trees often have branches that extend almost to the ground, and they are rich in flammable sap.

The fire’s run sputtered by Monday evening, though.

The passage of the cold front shifted the wind around to the northwest, pushing the fire “back onto itself,” Ellis said.

An air tanker dumped one load of fire retardant in front of the fire’s front before dark fell Monday, he said.

The fire was not growing on Tuesday, Ellis said.

Besides the wind shift, humidities had risen to about 50 percent and temperatures dropped by about 25 degrees from Monday.

Even cooler weather, with a chance of rain or snow, is forecast for today.

Ellis estimates that about 80 percent of the burned area is outside the Eagle Cap Wilderness.

Although fire officials strive to keep WFUs inside the wilderness, he doesn’t consider the Big Sheep Ridge a failure — so long as the flames stay away from private land.

“There’s always a risk with WFU, and it’s always on my mind,” Ellis said.

To reduce that risk, he said, fire bosses are more likely to approve a WFU that starts later in summer, as was the case with Big Sheep Ridge, ignited on Aug. 29.

The Sloans Ridge fire in the Elkhorns, by contrast, started in late July.

Ellis said Wallowa-Whitman officials decided to douse, rather than manage as WFUs, several blazes that were sparked by lightning in the Eagle Cap in mid-summer.

Winds ushered in autumn

The gusty winds that drove the Big Sheep Ridge fire past the Eagle Cap Wilderness boundary on Monday were the harbingers of fall.

A cold front that arrived late in the day shifted the wind direction from south to northwest, and brought much cooler air to Northeastern Oregon.

The high temperature at the Baker City Municipal Airport plunged from 85 degrees on Monday to 54 on Tuesday.

The 31-degree difference was the biggest one-day drop in high temperature this year.