Fire crews turn corner

Wednesday, June 7, 2000 | 11:17 a.m.

COLD CREEK -- For the fourth straight day Tuesday, helicopter manager Lee Nelson watched white smoke surge across Cold Creek Canyon, northeast of the Buck Springs wildfire, as afternoon heat kicked the fire up another notch.

As a Sikorsky Skycrane helicopter battled hot June winds with its 1,000-gallon load of water from the one of three ponds in Cold Creek, Nelson, an eight-year employee of the U.S. Forest Service, predicted that the 2,000-acre blaze will be contained by Thursday.

By this morning 75 percent of the blaze was contained, Forest Service spokeswoman Becky Blodgett said, and the wildfire had not spread beyond the 2,000 acres that were burning on Tuesday morning.

Fire restrictions for the entire Spring Mountain range west of Las Vegas were announced by the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management today. No open fires will be allowed outside of improved campgrounds, which cost a fee to enter, said BLM spokesman Phil Guerrero.

No fireworks of any kind are allowed on any public land at any time.

Fire crews gained the upper hand Tuesday night on the fire that started Sunday in Buck Springs, about 60 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

About 50 hot shot crews, including the Black Mountain team from Carson City, considered one of the top five in the country, remained atop Bonanza Pass to cut off the fire from the small community of Cold Creek.

The pattern to the wildfire could change today, however, if the National Weather Service forecast for high winds and low humidity fans the flames.

The Weather Service issued a "red flag warning" for Nevada and Arizona today because of winds gusting as high as 40 mph, meteorologist Steve Leach said. "We've been hoping and praying they would get the fire under control before the winds picked up," he said Tuesday night.

The changing weather pattern could complicate efforts by 660 firefighters from the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Nevada Division of Forestry and Bureau of Indian Affairs from dousing the flames.

While hot, dry days with winds up to 15 mph have fanned the Buck Springs flames from a 160-acre fire on Saturday to 2,000 scorched acres by this morning, calm winds and humidity as high as 40 percent dampened the roaring blaze at night, Nelson said.

A combination of trees, cheat grass and weeds growing over the years fueled the Buck Springs blaze.

State fire officials expect Buck Springs to be the unofficial start of a long, dangerous fire season, which officially begins Friday.

Only parts of northeastern Nevada have had enough rainfall to thwart the threat of forest fires, Nevada State Division of Forestry Chief Roy Trenoweth said.

The Buck Springs blaze at 2,000 acres is one of the largest of 450 wildfires burning in the nation today.

Wildfires caused by nature, such as a bolt of lightning, often help the natural growth of the forest, Nelson said. Lodge pole and ponderosa pine trees can release seeds and withstand flames among low-growth brush below the trees, but when undergrowth that climbs the tree trunks burns, it fuels a hot fire that cooks the plants.

While Nelson has fought fires from Fresno to Florida as small as a single tree struck by lightning to a raging inferno such as the Los Alamos, N.M., wildfire last month, he said that burns caused by humans are devastating.

"Human-caused fires are what we are concerned with," he said.

There is no known cause of the Buck Springs blaze, but Nelson said it started 2 miles from any road, so an off-road vehicle or an all-terrain vehicle with a single spark could have ignited the wildfire.

So far, the Buck Springs blaze has cost state and federal agencies $860,000 to fight and drawn firefighters from as far away as Alaska, Blodgett said.

The Forest Service will put an emergency recovery plan into place to protect the 27 endemic species in the 316,000 acres of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in the Spring Mountains, Blodgett said. A first step is to prevent more forest fires.

Although smoke from the fire continued pouring 2 miles downhill into Cold Creek, most of the 80 residents remained in their homes Tuesday, Cold Creek Fire Chief Terry Myers said. Myers bought his plot in 1982, a year after the 6,000-acre Cold Creek fire that destroyed 3,000-year-old bristlecone pines.

"I bought it anyway," Myers said of his remote home, "because the shadows over the mountains in the evening are constantly changing colors. We're never bored."