Less destructive fire season – so far – but danger still looms

It was a year ago this weekend when residents scrambled to flee Canyon City, as the Canyon Creek Complex Fire ripped through the town.

“I didn’t know, but I accepted the fact that I might lose the house,” said a Canyon City resident.

About 100 structures were damaged and 26 families lost their homes as the fire shot down the ridge, showing no mercy.

The Canyon Creek Complex of wildfires eventually burned more than 110,000 acres.

Just a few days later, a trailer towed by an RV along Highway 26 apparently sparked the County Line 2 fire on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, which burned more than 67,000 acres.

This year, “we have had a few human-caused starts and a couple that have been undetermined,” U.S. Forest Service Public Information officer Kassidy Kern said Thursday. “We’ve been able to really hit them hard with aerial resources and then backed that up with boots on the ground.”

But just because we haven’t had a big wildfire on the High Desert yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

“This year, we’re in a little bit of a different situation,” Kern said. “We had a lot of early moisture and so we were not in the extreme fire danger early on. Now we are. Now, we are in those extreme conditions, and while we had a brief rest recently with those rains and cooler temperatures, now we’re ramping up again with 90 degree days for several days at a time.”

No one wants the tragedies of years past to happen again this year, so firefighters are ready for the first major local fires of the season.

As fires are often human-caused, officials urge you to make sure you completely extinguish your campfires, mind your cigarette butts and try not to drive your vehicle into areas with tall grass.