reduced to embers

Close to Home: Utah’s Salt Creek Fire

By Christian Probasco, 7-24-07

	Fire approaching Fountain Green, Utah. Photos courtesy of Pat Johnson.

I spent Sunday evening on the roof of my in-laws’ house, watching the Salt Creek Fire creep down the hills to the north towards their town of Fountain Green.

The fire started on Thursday. My wife Sarah and I were in Ephraim, about a half-hour from our home in Mount Pleasant, when we noticed a column of smoke rising from Nephi Canyon, not far from Fountain Green. The power went out in the restaurant where we were eating. That’s when the blaze burned up the lines on the north side of the canyon and blacked out nearly all of Sanpete County. The electricity stayed gone for hours, until it could be routed up from the south.

The fire incinerated a campground, burned up to the rim of the canyon and over the hills above Fountain Green and threatened to sweep into town that first evening. I drove out to a ranch which belonged to the Johnson family and watched the flames eat up the rangeland above their home. Fire trucks and cop cars raced up and down closed Highway 132 through the canyon, and spotter planes circled overhead.

Around 9:00 Thursday night the wind died down and so did the flames. But there are wildfires burning all over Utah, and the crew was stretched so thin there weren’t enough people to contain it. It picked up again the next day, growing to about 12,000 acres, and expanding north.

The fire rested early Sunday morning and then erupted again in the evening and again crawled down the hills. The wind shifted, so now the column of smoke was drifting directly over Fountain Green. We could smell the fire in Mount Pleasant. Our neighbors told us that if it reached Big Hollow, a dry, windy side canyon north of town, it would race northeast with nothing to stop it until it hit distant Highway 89 and the town of Indianola. There was a possibility of rain that evening but all we’d experienced so far were a few light showers lasting for about three minutes each. I drove my wife, Sarah, and our baby boy to Fountain Green to see which way things would go and we joined Sarah’s parents, already on the roof, where we could see for miles in every direction.

	Slurry plane buzzes a house and drops its load.

They told us about a slurry tanker which had buzzed their home so close that, had it been banked more, they would have been able to read the pilot’s name tag. Following one of the spotter planes, the tanker had swooped in about ten feet above the white house at the edge of the town and dropped its load.

Most of the fire trucks we could now see were clustered around the white house. The flames were visibly advancing toward it from a narrow canyon. The wind was blowing towards us. The neighbors were either racing out to the edge of town to watch the fire or packing their belongings in their vehicles. Sarah went downstairs and piled all the pictures from the walls on the living room table and Wayne brought the Suburban around to the front of the house for a quick getaway.

As we watched, another line of fire lit up the bottom of the hill two ridges away. Looking through my binoculars, I could see a pickup ahead of it.

	Salt Creek Fire above Fountain Green, Utah

It was a backfire, and in ten minutes it was burning just as fiercely as the fire above it. Just after the line was set, the air in town went still. The backfire worked its way up the ridge towards its opposite. A few minutes later, two more backfires appeared closer to town. As the flames closed on each other, the winds between them increased. We saw twisters, like thin, black fingers. They seemed to be inscribing something on the side of the hill. The fingertip of the largest one was a flame about a hundred feet high, whirling into an orange blur.

Just as the lines were about to join, the wind in town picked up again. Flashes of dry lighting lit the hills, the tiny fire trucks and the whole town. Then it began to rain, hard, and it didn’t let up for about twenty minutes. The fire lost its enthusiasm. The flames were reduced to glowing embers like you’d see in a dying campfire, though there were so many, over such a wide area, that you could read the terrain from them.

We went to bed. In the morning, when we drove back to Mount Pleasant, there was no smoke in the sky. I suppose we should still be worried because the fire has been knocked down several times and has always gotten back up. But at least in the vicinity of Fountain Green, there isn’t much left to burn.

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