‘It’s End-of-Days-Type Stuff’: Wildfires Rage in Utah’s Mountains

The Cottonwood fire had grown to 92,000 acres as of Saturday morning, and torn through more than 100 condos and cabins at an expanding ski community.

Trent Owen, a home builder and volunteer firefighter in the mountains of southern Utah, was bracing for a brutal fire season. After a nearly snowless winter and a scorching spring, his six-person fire crew met every week to drill and discuss the wildfire threat looming over the tinder-dry Tushar Mountains.

Then, on Monday afternoon, Mr. Owen, 42, knocked off work to take his 8-year-old daughter to a soccer game, and saw what he had been dreading: A cloud of wildfire smoke was billowing up the canyon — “coming straight toward us,” he said.

The blaze in southern Utah, known as the Cottonwood fire, had exploded to nearly 92,000 acres by Saturday, tearing through a ski lodge, condos and rustic cabins around the small ski community of Eagle Point. Gov. Spencer Cox called it the “most destructive fire in the state’s history” in terms of property loss. No injuries or deaths have been reported.

The fire was still 0 percent contained by Saturday morning, and forecasters warned that hot, windy weather this weekend would create extraordinary fire danger for much of central and southern Utah, which is in a deep drought. Wind gusts are expected to reach 50 miles per hour with humidity levels expected to hover around 15 to 18 percent.

“Extreme fire behavior may occur in the afternoon as temperatures and wind speeds increase,” the U.S. Fire Service said.

The National Weather Service office in Salt Lake City used its “particularly dangerous situation” designation. A red flag warning remained in effect until midnight Saturday.

The weather also increases the dangers of falling trees or sudden, deadly wind shifts for the hundreds of firefighters trying to dig containment lines and gain control of the fire. On Friday, extreme conditions forced fire crews and air resources to disengage for parts of the day. In the North Fork drainage area, crews scouted for safer areas to re-engage.

Governor Cox issued a temporary restriction on fireworks through the July 4 holiday weekend. “More than 75% of Utah’s wildfires have been human-caused, and the danger to lives, homes, and our firefighters is simply too high,” he said in a statement on social media this week.

Currently, there are about 10 large wildfires across Utah, burning more than 170,000 acres. Warm winter temperatures, low snowpack and high winds have made much of the state vulnerable, said Alyssa Mason, a spokeswoman for Great Basin Team 5, the federal team leading the efforts.

In small towns at the foot of the mountains, residents are keeping a nervous watch on the plume of smoke billowing several miles away.

“I am standing here looking out my back window and I am watching the flames burn across the face of the mountain range,” said Matt Robinson, the mayor of Beaver, a city of roughly 4,000 people.

Mayor Robinson said he saw plumes of smoke lift from Beaver Canyon on Monday, driving home from work with his son. By Saturday, several of his family members and friends had lost property in the blaze.

“It’s really sacred ground — to watch it all disappear in a matter of a couple of days is pretty emotional,” he said of the charred landscape. “It’s end-of-days-type stuff.”

Fire officials have not provided details on the damage caused by the Cottonwood fire, but Shane Gadbaw, who owns the Eagle Point ski resort, estimated that at least 130 condos and cabins had been destroyed. He said one of the resort’s lodges had also burned, and he was concerned that some of the ski lifts had also been damaged.

“It’s terrible,” he said.

The evergreen-scented area around the resort had just a handful of full-time residents, but it was a fast-growing destination for people looking to buy or build affordable vacation homes, Mr. Gadbaw said.

He likened Eagle Point as the David to the Goliaths of Deer Valley or Park City, Utah skiing powerhouses. It was smaller, independently owned and more remote, but a few hundred people had second homes there, and Mr. Gadbaw said it was drawing more and more visitors from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.

Mr. Gadbaw, who bought the resort 17 years ago, was heading there to take some promotional photos of horseback riders and mountain bikers when he heard about the fire. He took a back road to get to his home — which survived — but fled the next morning.

“On our way out, it was burning around us,” he said.

Mr. Owen, the home builder, his wife, Kristina, and their two children were among the few full-timers. He moved to Eagle Point about 15 years ago after one of his contracting clients died and left Mr. Owen a house in the mountains.

“It was a little hidden gem,” he said. “We had this whole mountain range all to ourselves.”

They loved hiking, skiing or snowmobiling out their front door, and watching the elk that wandered through their yard. They had just put out a feeder for the summer’s hummingbirds.

Mr. Owen said three of the home-construction projects he was working on burned in the fire. So did his own family’s house.

Not long after the fire erupted on Monday afternoon, Mr. Owen said, a “doomsday glow” hung in the air and ash was snowing around him. He said the family evacuated at about 7 p.m. — his daughter, Aspen, grabbed her stuffed animals and made Mr. Owen pack her new mountain bike.

Mr. Owen said he monitored the fire by watching images from a neighbor’s doorbell camera, and believed his house would survive. But he said a local fire captain called him on Tuesday night to say that the house was gone.

Mr. Owen said he also lost hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of construction equipment, scaffolding and trailers of tools.

He is determined to go back, but said he does not know how he and his family will afford rebuilding their business and home from nothing. Many insurance companies have pulled out of fire-prone parts of the country, and, Mr. Owen said, while he has homeowner insurance, the coverage his insurer was willing to provide may amount to only a fraction of his family’s loss.

“I was living the dream,” he said. “Now, the dream has all burned.”

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