Wyoming’s ‘massive’ 2024 wildfire season second only to infamous ‘88

FROM WYOFILE:

Fire officials and foresters say that in many respects it was an unprecedented wildfire season in the Equality State, especially for private land and eastern forests.

At its peak, the mighty Elk Fire made a furious wind-driven, overnight run. Sheridan and Johnson County firefighters had never seen anything like it before on their home turf. Neither had their parents or grandparents.

Between 1:30 and 5 a.m. on Oct. 4, the blaze consumed more of the Bighorns’ rugged east slope than any previously documented fire had burned that forest in total.

“In a matter of three hours it ran 25,000 acres,” Bighorn National Forest Supervisor Andrew Johnson said weeks later. “[Previously], in the last 100 years, the largest fire on the forest had been about 18,000 acres — and it took over a month to get that size.”

By the time a potentially season-ending snowstorm hit in late October, the blaze had surpassed 98,000 acres. The Elk Fire, in other words, wasn’t just the largest wildfire in the 127-year-old Bighorn National Forest’s history — it was 5 times larger than anything in the record books.

Superlatives can also be used liberally when describing Wyoming’s 2024 wildfire season as a whole.

“Having over 810,000 acres burned in Wyoming is massive,” State Forester Kelly Norris told WyoFile on Oct. 21. “Weather really drove these fires. We had storms coming in, we had wind, and we just had a lot of fuel. It was an extremely challenging fire season.”

Other recent big fire years, like 2012 and 2020, burned closer to 300,000 acres, she said. The 2024 wildfire season more than doubled those years, which saw blazes like 2020’s Mullen Fire and 2012’s Fontenelle Fire.

When it comes to acres burned in the Equality State, 2024 will be recorded as second only to 1988 — the year that the infamous Yellowstone wildfires scorched 1.7 million acres of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, most of it in Wyoming.

While making a comparison to ‘88 is doable, there isn’t a database available that shows with certainty how 2024 stacks up historically to Wyoming wildfire seasons from decades long past, Norris said.

“I don’t have much data before the last two decades,” the state forester said. “We invested in software so we know our [recent] numbers are a lot more accurate, but that’s not the case when we look farther back.”

A distinguishing factor for 2024, Norris said, was where the flames ran over the landscape.

“What’s significant this year compared to years past is the amount of private and state lands that were impacted,” she said. “It’s going to end up being at least 75% private and state.”

Ordinarily, federally owned national forests — often the most timbered land in Wyoming — are where the bulk of acreage burns.

Wildfires first hit Wyoming early in the year, well before the normal wildfire season. In March, brush and grass fires swept across plains west of Cheyenne.

There was a lull of headline-making events during the greenest months, but as summer waned, drought worsened, curing finer fuels like grasses. Before long large swaths of the Powder River basin were ablaze.

Heating up

Four northeast Wyoming wildfires hit in the closing weeks of August — blazes that would ultimately account for about half the overall acreage burned. The House Draw, Flat Rock, Remington and Constitution fires collectively burned over 448,000 acres, much of it in non-forested grasslands and sagebrush-steppe where wildfires can quickly spread after ignition. The costly conflagrations blackened rangeland that livestock producers depend on for their cattle. It also delivered a blow to pronghorn, mule deer and sage grouse habitat in the northeast reaches of Wyoming.

In September, more Wyoming blazes kept wildland firefighters and land managers on their toes.

In a rural area north of Gillette, “extreme behavior” drove the Short Draw Fire to burn more than 30,000 acres, forcing evacuations in the Border Lines Estates/Ranchettes area.

By the end of the month, hot, dry and windy conditions were causing explosive behavior on the Bighorn’s Elk Fire and the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Fish Creek Fire.

The latter, which started deep in the backcountry south of Togwotee Pass, initially burned actively in dense stands of dead and downed timber, but it wasn’t spreading into the sagebrush and finer fuels like meadows. In a matter of weeks, however, the landscape’s natural fire breaks stopped holding back the blaze, which merged with and was renamed the Pack Trail Fire.

“Eventually the sage and the finer grasses and even the meadows started burning,” Bridger-Teton Supervisor Chad Hudson said.

Fuels indexes that gauge how ready vegetation is to ignite set records in mid-October, and a pocket of “extreme” drought settled in over southeast Teton County. The worst of the drought was right on top of the Pack Trail Fire, Hudson said.   

During its most active stages of growth, evacuations were ordered for swaths of the Gros Ventre River valley and at ranches off of Togwotee and Union Passes. By the time Hudson caught up with WyoFile on Oct. 28, the Pack Trail Fire was touching on 90,000 acres.

“That is the biggest fire since the ‘88 fires,” the forest supervisor said. “In 1988 we had two fires — the Mink and Huck fires — and they were both barely over 100,000 acres. So, big year for us.”

The Fish Creek-turned-Pack Trail Fire was Bridger-Teton’s only major blaze, but that’s only because of forest staff’s around-the-clock efforts to extinguish lightning-started spot fires.

“The Fish Creek Fire started Aug. 15 and the Pack Trail started Sept. 15,” Hudson said. “There were 38 fires during that time frame that the public really doesn’t know about, but we were very busy chasing.”

“We were successful,” he added. “We did a great job.”

Burning through the budget

Final expenses of Wyoming’s 2024 wildfire season are still being tallied, but Norris, the state forester, expects that statewide tab could approach $200 million. Total costs for the state of Wyoming and its local governments are going to be close to $60 million, she said.

The federal government foots the bill when blazes run over federal land, and there are complex cost-share agreements when wildfire crosses jurisdiction.

Going into the fire season, Wyoming had $39 million in its Emergency Fire Suppression Account. All of those funds, Norris said, have now been obligated.

The firefights on national forests in Wyoming are netting even steeper bills.

As of Oct. 22, the Elk Fire alone had run up a bill of $39.5 million, according to Johnson, the Bighorn Forest supervisor.

“Aircraft are expensive,” he said. “We used aircraft really intensively on this fire — which was appropriate, with the values at risk.”

The Pack Trail Fire was costlier yet.

“It’s going to be north of $50 million,” Hudson, the forest supervisor, said on Oct. 28. “We’re on our seventh critical incident management team, and each of those teams have hundreds of people. The teams, the engines on the fire, the aircraft, the infrastructure — it adds up.”

Wyoming’s 2024 wildfire season not only sapped coffers and ran local firefighters into the ground, but it also scarred the human landscape in a way that will take many months if not years to fully recover. Although relatively few homes were lost in the year’s blazes, they consumed assets around the Equality State that landowners and land managers will need to rebuild and regrow to return to normal life.

“We’ve lost a lot of fences, hay, winter range and other stuff that ranchers and communities in Wyoming rely on,” said Jared Delay, Wyoming’s fire management officer.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.

This story was posted on November 4, 2024.