Read more: Wet winter may delay - but not deter - 2023 fire season 'We must not let our guard down' Hot, windy conditions further primed vegetation to burn. are fairly fuel-limited in dry years, so there was that kind of natural fire break between plants or keeping it confined to relatively small areas,” said Christopher McDonald, a natural resources advisor at UC Cooperative Extension.īut after a year of above-average rainfall, there’s more fuel connecting perennial shrubs and Joshua trees, which enables fire to spread among the plants, he said. “Most of the deserts in the southwestern U.S. Invasive grasses played a role in stoking that fire, known as the Geology fire, which burned in an area populated by Joshua trees, Mojave yucca, creosote and senna, park officials said. But at lower elevations, the rains helped more grasses grow, and then several weeks of high temperatures caused the vegetation to dry out - or cure - priming it to become wildfire fuel.Īlready, a June 10 wildfire burned more than 1,000 acres in the Pleasant Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park. "Big fires in the desert are entirely consistent with the fire season outlook for 2023," Swain wrote, noting that poses a major concern for ecologists and desert conservationists.įire regimes tend to vary on a gradient from climate-limited, in which there is an abundance of fuel but conditions are often too wet to carry fire, to fuel-limited, in which the climate is generally conducive to fire but there is usually not enough vegetation to carry it.įor this reason, forecasters had called for a less active fire season in California’s higher-elevation forests, which are dense but remain moist from the wet winter. Given an exceptionally wet winter and cool spring, larger fires in sparsely vegetated areas that are typically "fuel limited" should be expected due to the extra vegetation growth such conditions foster. It all comes down to antecedent climate conditions. “They’re not as rare as we would hope them to be." “It’s a public misconception that the desert doesn’t burn, but we’re seeing right here that that’s not case," said Sierra Willoughby, a supervisory park ranger at Mojave National Preserve. No evacuations have been issued as a result of the fire, which is burning in mostly remote areas. After first being observed Friday, the blaze has spread mainly across the Mojave National Preserve in eastern San Bernardino County, but recently jumped into southwestern Nevada. The York fire had scorched 77,000 acres as of Monday, with no containment. The Mojave desert tortoise is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.Ĭalifornia's biggest wildfire of the year - burning through delicate Joshua tree forests along the California-Nevada border - is an unusual desert blaze being fueled in part by the rapid growth of underbrush from this winter's record rains. 1, 2023: A previous version of this story said endangered tortoises that live in the area of the fire could be harmed.
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