Сравнение пожаров 1960 и 2026 годов: почему современные огни ведут себя иначе

OUT AND ABOUT: Reminiscing with someone else fascinated by the history of the 1960 Anthony Burn Published 11:41 am Thursday, July 16, 2026 Brett Thomas and I share an interest — obsession is perhaps not an exaggeration — with the 1960 Anthony Burn. Until the era of “megafires” arrived in Northeastern Oregon a dozen or so years ago, that blaze, which spread over 20,000 acres in the northern Elkhorns northwest of Baker City, defined the area’s wildfire history. The 1938 Big Cow Burn south of Unity was an epic blaze, too, but the Anthony Burn was recent enough that quite a lot of people retain vivid memories of those late July days when a cataclysmic smoke plume fouled the horizon and the mountains glowed orange in the mid-summer twilight. The current Anthony Fire, which like its 1960 forerunner was ignited by lightning, is the biggest blaze in that area since. It was natural, then, that Brett and I would be curious about how this fire would behave, and in particular when the flames reach areas that haven’t been ablaze since Dwight Eisenhower was living in the White House. (Albeit only for several more months; John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were vying to replace Ike when bolts during a great dry lightning storm on July 19, 1960, ignited the seven fires that would coalesce to become the Anthony Burn.) My curiosity is that of a layperson. Brett, though, brings professional expertise to the exercise. He’s an operations sections chief for the team that’s been overseeing the effort to control the Anthony Fire. And he’s been a wildland firefighter for more than 35 years. Brett told me this week that while taking a helicopter flight over the Anthony Fire he flew near the place where, in July 1989, he was part of a 20-person crew from the Mount Hood National Forest who fought the Tanner Gulch Fire northeast of Grande Ronde Lake. It was one of dozens of fires sparked by a massive dry lightning storm — probably the worst in these parts since the 1960 tempest — on July 25 and 26, 1989. Although Tanner Gulch was a considerable blaze, covering around 7,000 acres, it was overshadowed by the larger Canal (25,000 acres) and Dooley Mountain (20,000 acres) fires, both spawned by the same storm. Brett said Tanner Gulch was his first “project” fire — a major conflagration — and he recalled sleeping under a yellow tarp not long before an August cloudburst helped douse the flames. In 1992, Brett started a 10-year stint in fire management on the Burnt-Powder Fire Zone, the southern part of the Wallowa-Whitman and an area that includes the Anthony Burn. His experience on the Tanner Gulch Fire moved the Wallowa-Whitman to the top of his list of places to land a job, he told me. Brett later moved to the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho, then in 2006 to the Umatilla National Forest, from which he recently retired, although he’s still a member of the management team overseeing the Anthony Fire. The defining characteristic of the Anthony Burn, after the embers cooled, is the forest of lodgepole pine that colonized thousands of acres of blackened ground. That’s the nature of the species. Many lodgepole pines have resin-rich cones that release their seeds only in the heat of a fire, and the pattern has been repeated after several other big burns in the region. A prominent example is in the Winom Creek area on the Umatilla, east of Ukiah, where a forest almost exclusively of lodgepoles thrived after a fire in the 1990s. These “dog hair” thickets don’t look terribly different from a Christmas tree farm, as the trees are about the same size and they grow in tight, orderly rows, rather like a field of corn. Brett told me that he has long wondered what would happen when the first large fire reached the 1960 Anthony Burn, and in particular the vast expanses of dense lodgepole. After hiking through sections of the old fire many times over the past 35 years myself, including occasional blunderings through the thickets, risking my corneas with each step, the same question has often occurred to me. And now, more than six decades on, we have an answer. A partial one, anyway. Brett said that on July 11, when the Anthony Fire, propelled by gusty southwest winds, more than doubled in size, the fast-moving flames spread into lodgepole stands between Indian and Anthony creeks. And when the fire got there, he said, “it definitely lost its steam.” Although such thickets, where the branches of almost every tree touch those of one or more neighbors, might seem ripe for burning, Thomas said the needles, despite the drought, still hold a fair amount of moisture. The bigger factor, he said, is the lack of fuel on the ground. The 1960 fire left something of a blank slate, Brett said, with few of the limbs and logs that litter the floor of a mature, unburned forest. The lodgepoles that have grown in their thousands are young enough that they have yet to drop many limbs. Brett said the lack of debris on the ground robs the fire of the heat that can keep flames racing through tree crowns even when winds slow. The Anthony Fire has spread more readily, he said, in places that didn’t burn in 1960. Those forests, a mixed conifer type that includes subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, tamarack and lodgepole, have much more ground fuel. Brett said the fire has been a classic “mosaic” burn, meaning the flames burned intensely in some patches but much more lightly in others. That’s typical of fires at relatively high elevations — the Anthony Fire started at around 7,000 feet, although it has spread to areas below 6,000 feet on the eastern and northern flanks. On July 10, before much of the public land near the fire was closed, and the day before the Anthony Fire made its big wind-aided run, I hiked the road to Sand Flats, along Anthony Creek, and another mile or so up the stream. Like Brett with the Tanner Gulch Fire, I have a personal connection to this place. In September 1992, just before I started with the Baker City Herald, I was part of a Forest Service crew marking trees for a planned timber sale. (That sale, called Sand Gap, was shelved, and none of the spray-painted trees was ever cut.) The units we marked were on the steep slope just south of Anthony Creek. This mature forest, so far as my untrained eyes could tell, was unscathed by the 1960 fire. Not so on the north side of the stream, where the telltale evidence of that fire — lodgepole thickets — dominates. I wondered, as I scrambled over fallen trees and tried to keep limbs from striping my calves with the sorts of scratches a playful kitten might leave, what the flames might do if they reached this far. As of Thursday, July 16, the fire had crossed the crest of the ridge where we marked trees almost 34 years ago, but flames had not reached Anthony Creek. It might still get there, Brett told me, if nature concocts the necessary recipe of wind and temperature and humidity. I’ll go back when the fire is out, and I’ll go with anticipation, wondering about the changes the flames will have wrought in a familiar place. Brett said he’s all but certain that lodgepoles, as they did 66 years ago, will barge in first, the coniferous version of subway riders who shove their way to the front of the line. I’m trying to envision a forest where lodgepole seedlings, no thicker than my finger, grow next to their six-decades-old cousins, those beneficiaries of a fire that forged its legend long ago. All I can be sure about, of course, is that things will look different. And that the compelling story of the Anthony Burn — the one Brett and I find so interesting — will have a new chapter. Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald. Contact him at 541-518-2088 or jayson.jacoby @bakercityherald.com.