Cliff Creek 3

Jackson Hole News & Guide, Mike Koshmrl– All around the mountainsides smoke wisped off the mostly denuded forest floor under the corpses of conifers that reached up over the eastern reaches of the Hoback Canyon.

The smoldering hot spots were numerous on both sides of the highway and Hoback River, left behind from the zero-percent-contained 6,700-acre Cliff Creek Fire. The landscape and the view from Bondurant of the convergence of the Gros Ventre and Wyoming ranges will look transformed for decades to come.

Fire Incident Commander Tony DeMasters is doing everything he can to ensure that dozens of Bondurant and Granite Creek Road residents will still have homes where they can take in the evolving mountainous vistas.

Helping out is a team of 500 people, 18 engines and a handful of firefighting helicopters and airplanes that can drop water. The task won’t be easy: By midafternoon Tuesday, about 48 hours after it was sparked by lightning, the Cliff Creek Fire proved it was a powerful, fast-moving force.

“It’s burning very fast, very aggressively,” DeMasters said from a command post at the North Fork Fisherman Creek gravel pit. “This thing moved, let’s call it 3 miles in 24 hours.”

Efforts to hold the Cliff Creek Fire back Tuesday were centered on the western portion of the Sublette County community of Bondurant, home to the Elkhorn bar and gas station, residences, ranches and guest cabins. A pole barn near the highway was already a casualty of the wildland fire.

Many of the 21 crews assigned to the blaze were unseen in the hillsides near Bondurant in the early stages of digging in “hand lines,” which are defensible cuts in the timber and sagebrush where they could later hope to hold the line if the fire advances. In other places, such as along Cliff Creek Road, crews were lighting controlled burns at night so the forest will burn on their terms.

“We’re using a confine, contain strategy,” DeMasters said. “That means wherever we can find a place to put this thing into a foothold or get a headlock on it, then we’re going to do that.”

Firefighters also bustled with activity Tuesday up Granite Creek Road, home to about 60 structures spread out across ranches, homesites, campgrounds and a popular hot spring. Granite Creek’s inhabitants were all successfully evacuated Monday, DeMasters said.

“To my knowledge,” he said, “everybody is out.”

Shane Moore was one person who had to scramble to recover valuables from his family’s place near Granite Creek on Monday.

“We have a family cabin that’s been there going on four generations,” Moore said, “so we’re hoping it’s still standing at the end of this.”

Moore’s grandparents, Don and Dorothy MacLeod, bought 160 acres that was part of the original homestead along the creek. The Jackson filmmaker has spent a lifetime frequenting the scenic plot that his parents turned into a ranch in the 1950s.

“I grew up looking up at the hillside,” Moore said of the timbered slopes east of the creek, “and I knew it was only a matter of time.”

Out on a hike along nearby Shoal Creek when a storm rolled through and the blaze first ignited by lightning over the weekend, Moore called it in to authorities. The smaller but still-burning Deer Ridge Fire was lit at the same time and from a lightning bolt that hit only 300 yards away, he said.

Bridger-Teton firefighter and engine captain Rick Lancaster happened to be in the area investigating an unrelated small lightning-lit fire on the slopes of Clause Peak when the reports first came in of the Cliff Creek Fire around 2:30 p.m. Sunday. He arrived at the ignition point not far from the highway within around a half hour.

“As far as initial attacks go on the Bridger-Teton, this one was one of the quicker responses,” Lancaster said.

But with strong winds and dry conditions, it was already too late.

“It was high up on the knob off the road and there was just no way we could get to it,” Lancaster said. “It didn’t take long before it hit the highway and after that it pushed over into Bondurant.”

The longer-term goal for the Cliff Creek Fire is to drive it up into the high country south of the Gros Ventre Range’s crest, where timberland transitions into rocky, alpine terrain.

On a large map, DeMasters’ finger ran over the forestland to the east of Granite Creek. He traced a large swath of wildland to the north of the fire’s leading edge past Shoal Falls and up toward Antoinette Peak. Bridger-Teton Road 30590 marks the east boundary of the corridor where they’ll try to direct the blaze, he said.

“Once it gets up into here, it’s in the wilderness,” he said. “If the plan goes well and it gets up into the wilderness, it could go until the snow flies.”

At midday Tuesday the flames were staying mostly atop the ridges southeast of Granite Creek.

In case it arrives in the valley down low, Teton and Sublette county firefighters have been hard at work clearing out trees and brush and pumping water from Granite Creek to feed sprinklers laid between Bridger-Teton land and the homes just downslope. They were also cutting a fireline behind developed areas like the Jack Pine Summer Homes.

At the Moore property, a close call with wildfire in the 1980s prompted the family to clear out trees right around the cabin. The building also has a fireproof steel roof, Moore said.

“I think we learned our lesson there, and we cut a good perimeter back from the cabin,” he said. “So we’re hopeful.”

Elsewhere in the drainage there was plenty of private land protection work to be done, DeMasters said.

Homeowners that live on the interface with western forests are advised to adhere to “firewise” building codes, but oftentimes those precautionary measures aren’t taken until it’s too late.

“From the sounds of it, very minimal has been done at Granite Creek,” DeMasters said. “That leads to more hurdles and more hazards and it puts firefighters sometimes at undue risk when firewise hasn’t been completed on the homeowner’s part. It’s a circle of a beast itself.”

It’s likely by the time readers lay eyes on the News&Guide the Cliff Creek Fire will have burned up square miles of new terrain. Aircraft that fly at night using infrared technology complete acreage estimates for the burned area once a day. Between Monday and Tuesday the estimated size leapt from 2,200 to 6,700 acres.

The weather in coming days, for firefighting purposes, isn’t ideal.

The National Weather Service’s Riverton office calls for windy conditions, very low humidity and “critically dry fuels” on the portion of the Bridger-Teton where the Cliff Creek Fire burns. Dry, southwest winds are expected to continue into the weekend.

Despite talk of its reopening, there are no plans to allow the public to travel down Highway 189/191 past the Stinking Springs pullout area. On the Pinedale side the highway is closed at Daniel Junction.

Pilot vehicles could be leading caravans of vehicles through the canyon in the “very near future,” DeMasters said, though he did not pinpoint a target time or day.

Small spot fires on Tuesday were active on both sides of the roadway in the canyon.

Public meetings about the wildfire will be held at 6 p.m. today at the Bondurant School, 6 p.m. Thursday at the Hoback Junction Fire Station and at 6 p.m. Friday at the old elementary school in Pinedale.

 

Category: Uncategorized