A winter heavy in snowfall has slowed the start to the wildfire season across parts of the West, although the return of the El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean could reverse that start and contribute to another smoky summer in the National Park System west of the Continental Divide.
Climate change, coupled with the departure of the La Niña weather pattern over the Pacific Ocean and the arrival of El Niño, are making it more challenging to predict fire seasons and fire behavior from year to year. That's obvious from the past three years, which have featured devastating wildfires in Western national parks.
- During 2020 the Castle Fire that blazed out of control across Sequoia National Park killed an estimated 7,500 to 10,600 large sequoia trees, according to the National Park Service. That year also sparked massive wildfires in Mojave National Preserve and a fire at Point Reyes National Seashore on coastal California, a place most probably don’t connect with wildfires.
The East Troublesome Fire of 2020 actually jumped the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park/NPS file
The East Troublesome Fire that roared into Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado from the west in 2020 was another exceptional blaze, but not for the acreage it blackened. Not only did it destroy the Grand Lake Entrance Station to the park and some other facilities, but it actually leaped the Continental Divide. That leap, said James Wallman, a meteorologist at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, is an example of the extreme fire behavior climate change is driving.
"That is the first time I can remember hearing about [that behavior]. And then, in 2021, we had two fires cross the Sierra crest," he said last week during a conversation. "That has never happened before, going from the west side of the crest to the east side. One of them was the Dixie Fire."
- 2021 brought the KNP Complex of fires that burned more than 88,000 acres in Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks and adjacent national forests, and the Dixie Fire that burned more than 73,000 acres south to north through Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California. Smaller fires also were reported at Big Bend National Park in Texas and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.
- Last year the Washburn Fire threatened the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park, and there also were early season fires in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Bandelier National Monument and Valles Caldera National Preserve, Big Bend National Park, and even at Isle Royale National Park.
During the Traveler's reporting on the aftermath of the 2020 fire season, we noted that Western wildfires have spiked since 2015, culminating in the 2020 fire-season inferno. Kristen Shive, a forest and fire ecologist with the National Park Service, told Rita Beamish for a story examining the fallout of that 2020 fire season that in a little over a century, from 1910 through 2014, wildfires burned 25 percent of the giant sequoia range. Then in 2015 through 2020, wildfires burned 65 percent of the range: 2020 alone accounted for half of that, engulfing 16,000 grove acres, dwarfing the 1910-2014 combined acreage burned.
Wallman says it is getting harder to predict fire seasons from one year to the next.
"We do look at past years and try to find what we call 'analog years' that are similar to the way that weather and climate and fuels are playing out," he said. "This year really does not compare to any of the last three, because the last three years we were in La Niña and El Niño has just emerged. So we're looking at years that had a decent La Niña the year before and then moved into El Niño fairly quickly, like it did this spring. There's not a whole lot of those years to look back at. Some of those years are all the way back in the '50s.
Much of the Board Camp Grove of giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park was destroyed by the 2020 Castle Fire/NPS file
"How do they apply to the current conditions now, when there's so much different? We don't know," he went on. "The closest we could get to was 2008-2009. And we're using that kind of delayed fire season [for comparison]. Not necessarily a really big fire season, but it was still fairly active. And so that's kind of what we're expecting. At least for now we're expecting a fairly active season geared more towards late July, August, which is normal. And going into September. But we're not expecting an exceptionally long fire season into October or November like we saw in 2020. Part of the reason is with El Niño, at least in the fall, we do start seeing the rain return to the Pacific Northwest."
El Niño's arrival is slowing fire conditions in the West as it brings wetter weather to the Southwest, but also sheparding drier weather into the Northwest that could prove problematic. The result is a slower start to the fire season in places like Saguaro, Grand Canyon, and Zion national parks, while parks in the Northwest are drying out and becoming more flammable. Olympic and North Cascades national parks are drier than they normally would be at this time of year, more like they would be in late July and early August, said the meteorologist.
Another area of concern, said Wallman, is Glacier National Park in northern Montana where the snowpack on the west side of the park melted off early.
But at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon things aren't too concerning because the park was on the edge of the heavy snowfall California received, he said. "We're not expecting an early start to the season there, but up in the Northwest, for especially Olympic, North Cascades, Mount Rainier, that's where we have more concerns as we head into this summer."
Last year's Washburn Fire threatened the Mariposa Grove of Sequoias in Yosemite National Park/NPS file
Places like Yosemite, Lassen Volcanic, Redwoods, and Great Basin all benefited from winter's snows, and the same goes for Rocky Mountain National Park, at the head of the Colorado River drainage that saw record snowfall.
"At least in the Sierra [fire danger is] going to start slower, and it may stay very low, at least at the higher elevations in the Sierra," said Wallman. "But farther east, we're expecting our normal fire potential. ... In the Southwest, I think we're a little bit more concerned, toward like Bandelier, possibly around Grand Canyon, Zion, because of this drier than normal monsoon. We could have higher than normal fire potential there this summer."
For now the Fire Center staff is watching how the monsoonal weather develops.
"We know at least for the next two weeks it's going to be really dry with the monsoon. We're not going to see the normal increase that we do see by early July in the Southwest. So that has us concerned," he said.
Conditions are changing, and not just in the West. This past week saw the National Park Service place fire restrictions in areas of Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Carlsbad Caverns national parks, while Yellowstone National Park is reporting moderate fire danger. Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota has banned campfires at Fort Charlotte due to high fire danger, while nearby Voyageurs National Park also has banned campfires as well as charcoal-fueled fires or grills.
If you don't live in the West, or haven't visited it a time or two, it can be hard to appreciate that, after the fiery summers of 2020, 2021, and 2022, that there's much more forest to burn.
"There's a lot. I mean, when you see the size of the West, when you live out here for any length of time, there are still a lot of areas that have not been touched," Wallman said. "You can pull up a map for the last 30 or 40 years and you can see a bunch of areas that have burned two or three times in that period, if not more. And there are areas that have not been touched. The interesting thing about fires in the West is that some of these areas historically probably burned more frequently. Every 10 years or so."
Through the end of last week, there were 22,0252 fires tracked by the National Interagency Fire Center, and they have burned 636,031 acres. Those numbers are below the 10-year average of 25,006 wildfires and 1,478,575 acres burned, the center noted.
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