The Willow Creek Fire

Yesterday afternoon our neighbors arrived from their Utah home. Their route had taken them along Highway 89 and they told us of encountering heavy smoke and firefighters as they neared and traveled over Salt Pass. The night before our friends Becky and Fred had gone to a dark sight to view and take pictures of the Milky Way. They had seen and photographed the flames from thirty miles away. Yesterday, after Pickleball we could see the huge clouds from the smoke and last evening heard that Salt Pass and Highway 89 were closed. The news was good and bad, Good in that the firefighters had prevented the fire from jumping over the highway and bad in that the fire had grown in size to almost four thousand acres, (about six square miles). We don’t live in a forest and should be safe from this fire, but we are less than a mile from National Forest land and are surrounded by unmown grasses and fields filled with hay. There are no fire hydrants in our Rv Park, that we know of, and so we decided we need a plan in case of a prairie fire. We once saw a prairie fire in a field in Gillette and how quickly the flames grew to over eight feet tall. If the flames are over two feet tall, a person cannot stop the fire. At over eight feet even equipment must flee, and the fire can’t be fought, Gillette was lucky that day as the wind died down. People had gotten out their water hoses and were standing and waiting out the flames. It wouldn’t have worked. The best thing to do was to evacuate. So, we discussed what we should do. Evacuation is the safest thing in a fire, before it’s too late. To prepare we need a emergency pack with our papers, passports, and insurance information. The vehicles need to be gassed up and ready to go. What we really need is a good soaking rain, something we have not seen for almost two months…… And so we pray for rain and not for clear skies. Ps we are not in any danger and thirty miles from the evacuation area, but now is the time to prepare for future fires