High temperatures, dry conditions, winds and a chance of thunderstorms forecasted for eastern Summit County could increase fire activity, but that's not fire officials' main challenge when fighting the Beulah Fire.
Fire behavior analyst for the Great Basin Team 4, Matt Filbert, said at a briefing Tuesday evening, the weather isn’t the main challenge with the High Uintas fire.
“There's a lot of beetle kill from 20 or so years ago in both the spruce and lodgepole pine. The vast majority, 80, 90% of [the trees] died back then.”
Filbert said the fire can spread easily between the dead trees.
“It does what we call torching, where the fire torches, and it throws embers which land into the next area, and then it does it again, and it just keeps repeating itself, and that's how this fire is growing.”
More than 460 personnel are working the fire, including crews manning multiple aircraft, two bulldozers and 13 fire engines.
Firefighters, called hotshots, arrived near Cataract Basin on the northeast side of the fire to try to contain the northernmost point of the blaze.
Operations section chief for the response team Kevin Norton said helicopters and airplanes are assisting the ground crew.
“On the fire itself, right now, we're running thousands of gallons of water from helicopters, from scooper planes to keep the fire in as much check as we can.”
The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.
The Beulah Fire is the third-largest wildfire in the state.
The Monroe Canyon Fire in Piute County remains the largest. It has burned almost 72,000 acres since it sparked July 13 and is 38% contained.
So far this year Utah has experienced almost 760 wildfires, 71% of those were human caused.
That’s fewer than the 880 fires that had started by August 2024, but a higher percentage of human-caused fires.
