Most of the time, fire rests at night.
But not the Elk Fire burning in northern Wyoming, now at more than 76,000 acres with a perimeter of 225 miles. This fire has been a much different beast.
“This thing is behaving like a teenager,” Field Operations Chief Adam Ziegler told a crowd of nearly 500 people from Story, Big Horn and other areas threatened by the Elk Fire on Wednesday night.
They gathered in the Big Horn High School gymnasium, filling up all the seats, the bleachers and, when there wasn’t any room left, standing up against the back wall, eyes and ears lasering in on what’s being done to save their homes and ranches.
“Most fires are up all day and sleeping all night,” Ziegler told them. “And they run uphill, not down. But the Elk fire is going downhill in the middle of the night.”
That creates multiple challenges for the firefighters on the front lines, where the fire is at 15% containment as of Thursday morning, mostly on its northeast front.
“One, we can’t see at night,” Ziegler said. “So, we have a hard time, whether it’s our heavy equipment our engines, they can’t see where they’re going.”
A bright, moving fire line is blinding at night, too, making it impossible for firefighters to see the ground next to it.
“The equipment’s turning up dust that you’re flushing off mirrors and windows and they can’t see where they’re going,” he said. “So that really slows our progress down.”
Creating A Catcher’s Mitt For A Fireball
The irregular behavior of the fire is also forcing the adoption of different tactics than usual for the Elk Fire’s 900-plus firefighters working this scene. That figure doesn’t include local volunteer firefighters, who have integrated their efforts with the Rocky Mountain Area team.
“Where it’s pushing downhill on us like that, and it’s spotting — throwing out spot fires ahead — we’re not able to just go in and put a dozer line, a road grader line, and have that hold it,” Ziegler said.
Retardant from airplanes can’t create a wide enough line quickly enough to be effective either. And chemical retardants are not immune from fire. An intense fire can still eat through them.
Because of that, retardant is no magic bullet. It’s not effective in all areas, and it also takes considerable time to get it applied in a manner that does any sort of job at all.
That means it’s not effective at the bright fire line, and it’s also much more effective outside of timbered areas, where the fire isn’t at white hot heat.
“So, as we speak, the crews are probably already going on it, but we’ve pushed lines, two parallel lines down across the front, out in the grass, away from the timbers’ edge to get ahead of this thing, and what they’re doing is a term we use more in prescribed fire. It’s called black lining,” Ziegler said.
Black lining refers to creating a buffer zone by quickly back-burning fine fuels before the fire arrives. That creates an area can then serve as a catcher’s mitt, to catch the oncoming fireball and stop it right at that point.
“That will hopefully be done before this (fire) pushes on us,” he said. “And it will be wide enough to catch that pulse and that way we’re not on the defensive again. We’ll be on the offensive.”
The Red Grade Road
The main line they’ve chosen to hold the fire to is the Red Grade Road, Ziegler said.
“The plan is to (backline) all the way down to Red Grade Road,” he said.
That will keep the fire from getting pushed back up the mountain by wind, and then firefighters will be able to outflank the blaze and keep it within a contained area.
“So, you might see extra smoke heading south,” Ziegler said. “That is our firefighters doing that and progressing ahead of this fire. We’re going to hold up with that at Red Grade Road.”
Another group of firefighters, meanwhile, are working up through the Little Goose burn scar of 2007.
“That’s a good canopy opening,” Ziegler said. “That gets us enough distance from the live trees that the potential spotting over that is thinner. And then we’ve pushed lines down into that Red Grade area up onto Poverty Flats, and we’re working our way around it.”
In addition to crews working to reinforce fire lines, other crews are working to protect structures.
“When I talk about preparing structures, there are a lot of different tactics that we use, and it’s going to be different for every structure, depending on where it sits, what the structure is like, and what we expect the fire pass to be,” Ziegler said.
Some of those tactics include putting fire lines around the structure with hand crews and heavy equipment, others involve using sprinklers and pumps, drawing from nearby creeks or ponds.
“If there’s not something like that around, we can haul in portable tanks and put all the water in with water tenders — big tank trucks — so we can have water spraying around those,” he said.
A meeting to discuss fire strategy for the Elk Fire drew close to 500 people to Big Horn Wednesday night. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Residents check the Elk Fire map after a community access meeting held in Big Horn Wednesday night. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
Sheridan County Sheriff Levi Dominguez, center, talks with residents of story and Big Horn about efforts to contain the Elk Fire. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily) 
A meeting to discuss fire strategy for the Elk Fire drew close to 500 people to Big Horn Wednesday night. (Renee Jean, Cowboy State Daily)
Big Goose Canyon Watershed
One of the huge concerns right now is the Big Goose Canyon watershed, which has the infrastructure that’s supplying Sheridan with water.
“There’s two ways we can mitigate that,” Ziegler said. “We can exclude the fire from that, which the fire has already pushed itself in there, so we can’t exclude the fire. So now we can reduce the fire intensity.”
That’s going to involve strategic firing using aerial assets, from drones to helicopters.
“We’ll introduce fire high on the hill and allow that to back down with a low intensity,” he said. “So, we don’t have a lot of mortality within that timber stand, and so we’re not introducing a lot of sediment, when water runs off, down into the water system.”
Overnight, fire crossed the Big Goose River — as expected — on the southern end of the fire, according to reports from the Rocky Mountain Area Complex Incident Management Team.
Measures taken to reduce the fuel load before the active fire arrived were successful, according to the Thursday morning report of overnight fire activity.
Road graders continue working Thursday alongside firefighters to finish preparing the Red Grade Road to hold the Elk Fire.
Crews are also building additional control lines and preparing certain areas for strategic firing and aerial operations to ensure protection of the watershed and the associated water-treatment plant.
What’s Happening Along Montana Border
Up north close to the Montana border in the Little Horn Canyon, crews have been working to prepare structures, setting up sprinklers around them and thinning out brush.
“They’ve also been preparing the 144 Road in case the fire does pushing into there and we have to fire that off,” he said. “They’ve put a line around this corner on the northwest side, and they were helped with aircraft today with retardant to help keep that in check, until they can get that hooked up here to a rock band.”
That established containment line did hold overnight, according to Thursday morning’s update, and minimal heat was detected in the area.
Containment lines are growing along the northeast side of the fire between the towns of Parkman and Dayton, and those show up as black lines on updated fire maps.
“That doesn’t mean we’re walking away from this and not looking at it,” Ziegler said. “That means we don’t have any active operations going on in there at this time. There are still fire engines patrolling making sure that everything good in there, and then also aircraft looking at it as we go.”
The containment status dips down almost to Tongue Canyon, and that will continue to be extended as quickly as possible.
“On the west side, we have all the structures at Burgess junction, and we have two different divisions of firefighters who have been in there since the get go, since we got here, and they are prepping the structures,” Ziegler said. “So, they’re in there with pumps and hoses, setting up the sprinklers and working containment lines around those structures.”
Additional pumps and sprinklers are to be installed Thursday, and firefighters will remain on scene to protect the structures and conduct defensive firing where needed.
If the fire continues to move south, everything is on track to catch and stop the fire in its tracks, Ziegler said.
“The firefighters are staged, and we have a good plan for everything that’s going to go on,” he said.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
