Over the weekend we had an enormous fire in our area, burning 215,000 acres in a 24 hour period! I believe the acreage total is up over 300,000 now but the fire in our area is done.... since it ran out of anything to burn.
I woke up at 5 am on Sunday morning and was opening some windows to let fresh air in when I noticed the whole horizon to the west was glowing red. Our town has a mighty river, the Snake between it and a high desert plateau which was currently on fire.
My husband and I jumped in the car and drove up top of our valley to see what we could see. To the south of us, the fire was so big that even though it was miles away we could see flames leaping. It was pitch dark so I couldn't
really get any good photos there.
We drove over to the Bliss Grade overlook and got some amazing photos, as we watched the fire advance for about an hour. The first photo shows the reflection of my car's windshield.
The next photo shows the fire advancing behind a cone shaped hill with the fire reflected in the river below. It was the eeriest feeling, as there was a ribbon of fire miles long, and way downriver in the dark, we could see only a couple of different spots where there was flashing red emergency vehicle lights. We thought "are we the only ones that know the whole place is on fire?"... we didn't know that everybody was fighting a fire south of here till later in the day.
As the dawn advanced, you can see where the fire has burned over the cone, the smoke is starting to come up that engulfed the Magic Valley all day. The firefighters protected structures up on the desert, and I could hear helicopters and bombers that were getting water out of the river to drop on the fire all day. Around 5 pm, the wind came up around 25-30 mph and the fire was at the river's edge. It jumped the river in 3 places, but fire departments from the whole valley were waiting and got it put out immediately. After that, the smoke just cleared out... the fire had run out of fuel at last. Whew!
