News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon
Cool, wet weather over the weekend and into Monday helped clear out smoke that plagued Sisters last week.
The Scott Mountain Fire burning 15 miles to the west inundated the region with smoke on Wednesday and Thursday, but that smoke abated with the change in weather. The fire is 3,300 acres in size and is 30 percent contained.
Firefighters are not attacking the fire directly. According to the incident command team, "the Scott Mountain fire, located in the Mt. Washington Wilderness, is burning in an area where fire has played a historic role; as such it is providing some benefit to the landscape. The strategy for this fire is to make use of those benefits while protecting structures and resources like the Anderson Creek watershed to the west of the wilderness, which is the water source for the greater Eugene area."
As the region dries out and warms up this week, the Sisters Country is likely to see some smoke again.
"Scott Mountain fire has a continuous source of fuel; it is likely to creep and smolder until fall weather stops its progress," said Ed Lewis, Incident Commander. "By establishing a containment line and backing it up with a secondary/contingency line, we retain opportunities for suppression activities to protect valuable resources while still allowing the fire to play its natural role."
Highway 242 has been reopened.
An emergency closure is in place for the Scott Mountain Fire area. The closure area map is available online at http://www.inciweb.org.
In other fire news, Sisters firefighters quickly knocked down two fires last week, both of them apparently human caused. The first was directly north of Zimmerman Butte cinder pit 3.5 miles west of Sisters. The fire burned about three acres.
A second fire started off Three Creek Road about seven miles south of Sisters and was knocked down before it had covered more than 1/4 acre.
Jim Cornelius is editor in chief of The Nugget and author of “Warriors of the Wildlands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans.” A history buff, he explores frontier history across three centuries and several continents on his podcast, The Frontier Partisans. For more information visit www.frontierpartisans.com.
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