Crews cut back on Trout Canyon blaze

Friday, Aug. 11, 2000 | 10:12 a.m.

The Midnight Suns Hot Shot team from Alaska stayed on top of the Trout Canyon wildland fire about 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas today as another 100 firefighters inched their way back down the mountainous terrain.

U.S. Forest Service incident commander Lewis Kearney said crews from North Carolina, Georgia and Florida will get two nights of rest from battling blazes throughout the West before either returning home on Sunday or being sent to another fire.

Kearney said his team of exhausted Southern states firefighters, working since July 25 without a break, is also expected to be released Saturday.

That will leave the firefighting to the local Las Vegas and federal interagency fire team, made up of Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service specialists.

There is no specific date for when the 878-acre Trout Canyon blaze, burning for its eighth day, will be fully contained. It was declared 95 percent contained Thursday.

Up to 300 firefighters, including the National Guard and Nevada prison inmates, have battled the wildfire in steep terrain since Aug. 4 after an apparent lightning strike on Aug. 3 sparked the blaze.

Two helicopters and four air tankers dropped thousands of gallons of fire retardant on flames as they flared up Griffith Peak, named for former Nevada Sen. E.W. Griffith, who opened the first resort on Mount Charleston a peak and a valley away to the north. Up to 3,000 gallons of retardant were dropped on Wednesday.

As the firefighters climbed down Griffith Peak, they built angled rock structures called water bars to divert future rainfall and protect the bare ground from erosion. The crews dug a line in the forest soils to prevent the fire from spreading to the Trout Canyon community of 25 residents, three miles below the peak, Forest Service spokeswoman Paula Cote said.

They also built check dams of rock or logs across some steep terrain to catch soils from runoff when rain returns to Southern Nevada, Cote said.

A hydrologist and ecologist tested the area's soils and mapped the burned area on Thursday to find out if the soils can be improved by planting or other measures to prevent serious erosion.