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

JACKSON — The wintry weather system that dropped a few inches of snow on Togwotee Pass overnight last Sunday has slowed the growth of the Fish Creek Fire and given firefighters room to contain the blaze.

While massive fires have torched nearly half a million acres in northeast Wyoming, blackening key wildlife habitat, the Fish Creek Fire is the largest conflagration in the western part of the Equality State. 

The fire has spent the better part of the last two weeks creeping north toward Togwotee Pass and the Brooks Lake Lodge, Pinnacle Heights summer homes and 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 away from the highway at its closest point, said Steve Best, the spokesperson for Northern Rockies Incident Management Team 1, the team managing the fire.

Last weekend’s snow helped crews slow the fire’s growth.

“That moisture wasn’t enough to put the fire out by any means,” Best said. “There’s really low moisture content in the heavy fuels” — large diameter woody debris like logs and snags — “that are there. However, since we’ve gotten that, it’s slowed it down for sure.”

The 11,500-acre fire remains active. Passersby crossing Highway 26 over Togwotee and residents of nearby communities like Jackson and Dubois will likely still see smoke in coming days. But the Fish Creek Fire isn’t growing as forcefully as when it first ignited and, at times, burned upwards of 1,000 new acres per day.

Instead, a relative lull provided by the precipitation has given fire crews time to build defensible lines and set up point protection — setting up water pumps and sprinklers, and removing vegetative fuels — around Brooks Lake Lodge and the Pinnacle summer cabins, where guests and residents have evacuated.

The goal is to prepare to protect the highway and homes in case the humidity drops, and temperatures and winds pick back up, creating more favorable conditions for the fire to grow again, Best said.

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

Over this weekend, Best said conditions look favorable. Winds are expected to hover around 5 mph for most of Saturday, and gust as high as 20 mph Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. Humidity is currently about 28%. Best said humidity typically helps fires spread when it drops below 20%.

Best described those conditions as “moderate.”

The incident management team doesn’t expect to close Highway 26 over the weekend, and Best said people with homes in the Pinnacle Recreation Residences are still able to reach the property if they need to get something as long as they let fire crews know they’re entering. That could change, however, if the weather turns and the fire begins to spread more rapidly, necessitating more active firefighting.

If conditions remain stable, passersby may have seen more smoke Friday afternoon, or may see more smoke over the weekend, as fire crews drop “golf ball-sized” explosives from helicopters on the east 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 strengthen control lines to the east.

“If people are seeing more smoke then they have been, that’s probably why,” Best said.

As the fire’s growth has slowed, Best’s team has also started using a new metric to describe the fire. On Tuesday, firefighters were saying the fire was 26% “contained,” a measure of how much of a fire’s perimeter has been surrounded by a control line that the fire won’t cross. Now, they’re using the phrase “completion,” a reference to the tasks they need to undertake to prevent the fire from spreading.

As of Friday afternoon, crews had completed 37% of those tasks, which include “confinement” — establishing fire lines and natural barriers that will stop a fire from spreading — and establishing “point protection,” the sort of work that’s been completed around Brooks Lake Lodge and the residences.