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By Billy Arnold
Jackson Hole News & Guide
Via Wyoming News Exchange

JACKSON — Winter weather that dumped several inches of snow on Togwotee Pass overnight Sunday night slowed the spread of the Fish Creek Fire and gave firefighters a chance to bring the blaze under control.

While massive wildfires have burned nearly half a million acres in northeastern Wyoming, darkening key wildlife habitat, the Fish Creek Fire is the largest in the western part of the state.

The fire has spent much of the past two weeks moving north toward Togwotee Pass and Brooks Lake Lodge, the Pinnacle Heights summer homes and the Breccia Drive subdivision on the north side of the highway. As of Friday afternoon, the fire was between a mile and a mile and a half from the highway at its closest point, said Steve Best, spokesman for Northern Rockies Incident Management Team 1, the team managing the fire.

Snowfall last weekend allowed firefighters to slow the spread of the fire.

“That moisture wasn’t enough to put out the fire by any means,” Best said. “In the heavy fuels” — large woody debris like logs and branches — “the moisture content is really low. But since we’ve had them, it’s definitely slowed it down.”

The 11,500-acre fire remains active. Passersby driving across Highway 26 above Togwotee and residents of nearby communities like Jackson and Dubois will likely continue to see smoke in the coming days. However, the Fish Creek Fire is not spreading as rapidly as it did in the early days, at times burning more than 1,000 new acres per day.

Instead, the relative lull in rain gave firefighters time to build defensive lines and set up point defenses — setting up water pumps and sprinklers and removing plant fuel — around the Brooks Lake Lodge and Pinnacle summer cottages, where guests and residents were evacuated.

The aim is to prepare the highway and homes for protection in case humidity drops and temperatures and winds rise again, which could create more favourable conditions for the fire to grow again, Best said.

“The fire is still there,” he added. “It’s just waiting.”

Best said conditions look favorable this weekend. The National Weather Service says winds are expected to be around 5 mph most of Saturday, with gusts as high as 20 mph Sunday. Humidity is currently around 28%. Best said humidity typically helps fires spread when it drops below 20%.

These conditions are best described as “moderate.”

The incident management team does not expect Highway 26 to be closed over the weekend, and Best said people living at Pinnacle Recreation Residences can still get to the property if they need anything, as long as they notify the fire department that they are coming in. However, that could change if the weather changes and the fire spreads faster, requiring more active firefighting.

If conditions remain stable, passersby could see more smoke Friday afternoon or could see more smoke over the weekend as firefighters drop “golf-ball-sized” explosive charges from helicopters onto the eastern side of the fire. The goal is to reignite areas where the fire has already burned but left pockets of fuel, Best said, to help shore up control lines to the east.

“If people are seeing more smoke than before, that’s probably why,” Best said.

As the fire’s spread has slowed, Best’s team has also begun using a new metric to describe the blaze. Firefighters said Tuesday that the fire was “contained” by 26 percent, a measure of how much of the fire’s perimeter has been surrounded by a control line that the fire will not cross. They now use the term “conclusion,” referring to the tasks they must complete to prevent the fire from spreading.

As of Friday afternoon, crews had completed 37% of those tasks, including “containment” — establishing fire lines and natural barriers that will prevent the fire from spreading — and establishing “point protection,” the type of work that has been done around Brooks Lake Lodge and the residence.