Unit 52 in so. central ID where we applied is getting thoroughly cooked by a range fire. 50k acres so far. They're setting backfires along the road where I got one last year. It's smokey enough out there that they can't fly retardant but they say that most of the smoke isn't from this fire. It's coming in from OR, WA, and Canada. Hard to believe that they can smoke that much weed but there it is.

50 acres is a range fire?

Did you see the K after the 50?

Little bitty "k" makes a big difference.

What's a thousand times among internet "friends"?

That does put things in perspective.
We killed a couple elk in a unit that had lost 110,000 acres to fire earlier that same season.
Congratulations on not getting your license.

Reading is a thing.

5 or 6 years ago we had a huge forest fire about 150 miles north of here. 2 years later, Google Earth updated that area and it showed the burned area. It's amazing how much green was still left where the fire had gone around things. Even these cheatgrass fed range fires will leave big unburned patches here and there.

With elk anyway, one or two seasons after a burn seem to be the optimal time when regrowth really brings the herds back in and hunters begin to have a lot of success.
Prolly not much different for open country.
In our particular situation the burn had only been a couple months prior and very little had regenerated yet. That made for a very interesting hunt. Elk could be spotted at great distances through the burn, but they could see us too, so it changed the rules some.

Cheatgrass is the curse of our western rangelands. It's an annual that grows fast with lots of dense folliage, then dries off in late July. When it burns, the seeds survive. The dry grass burns extra hot which kills native grasses and sagebrush. Then the next spring, the surviving cheat seeds grow fast and they're the only thing left to grow.
It was accidentally introduced from Russia in the late 1800's and has spread all over the west.

Its the shorter than natural interval between fires that kills out the native species not the temperature of the actual fire. Shorter intervals favor annuals much more than long lived perennials.

RC,

When the USFS gives a figure for the size of a fire it is area inside the entire perimeter. On average, within the perimeter, 40-60% of the area actually burns.

The Yellowstone fire is a really good example where the 275-300 year old stands of lodgepoles burned (they were ready to burn), the 200 year old lodgepole stands right next to the older stands generally didn't burn--they weren't ready to burn and were still fire resistant.


Casey

Yesterday I had occasion to be north of Sun Valley so on the way home I detoured through the fire area. It's a 20 mile desert road. It's not a bad road for where it is. If you don't mind catching some air on occasion, you can average about 15 mph across it. It's not nearly as bad as the news has been making out. Their big concern was the wooden poles for the power line that feeds the Sun Valley area. A few got scorched but none went down. There's a lot of lava out there that slowed the fire down, enough that there's a lot of unburned space inside the fire line. The road I was on was the northern limit of the fire. It never crossed it. I think most of the burned area along the road was from back fires. In many places it only burned a couple hundred yards and didn't meet up with the fire.
There's plenty of space out there for antelope. So now I wish I'd drawn a tag again.