NORTH ANDOVER — The Planning Board wants a local country club to do its due diligence before allowing it to cut down more than 30 trees along the lake that serves as the town’s water supply.
The Planning Board denied an application from the North Andover Country Club for an emergency watershed special permit at its meeting Tuesday.
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GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, Ariz. — When lightning sparked a small fire amid the stately ponderosa pines on the remote North Rim of the Grand Canyon last month, national parks officials treated it like a good thing.
Instead of racing to put the fire out immediately, as was the practice for decades, they deferred to the doctrines of modern fire science. The prevailing wisdom says the American West was forged by flames that nourish the soil and naturally reduce the supply of dry fuels.
So officials built containment lines to keep the fire away from people and the park’s historic buildings and then stepped back to let the flames perform their ancient magic.
That strategy worked well — until it didn’t. A week later, the wind suddenly increased and the modest, 120-acre controlled burn exploded into a “megafire,” the largest in the United States so far this year. As of Saturday, the blaze had burned more than 145,000 acres and was 63% contained.
“The fire jumped our lines on Friday, July 11,” said a still shaken parks employee who was on the front line that day and asked not to be named for fear of official retaliation. “By 3 in the afternoon, crews were struggling to hold it,” the employee said through a hacking cough, attributing it to smoke inhaled that chaotic day.
“By 9 p.m., there was nothing we could do. Embers were raining down everywhere and everything that could burn was burning,” the employee added.
In this time lapse footage, the Dragon Bravo Fire produces a pyrocumulus cloud. According to the Southwest Area Incident Management Team, these clouds form when intense heat from a wildfire pushes smoke high into the cooler atmosphere. As the smoke rises, water vapor in the air condenses at high altitudes, creating what is known as a pyrocumulus cloud, or fire cloud. (Cliff Berger/Southwest Area Incident Management Team)
Whether the Dragon Bravo fire’s escape from confinement was due to a colossal mistake, incredibly bad luck, or some tragic combination of the two, will be the focus of multiple investigations.
But the fact that it happened at all, and especially in such a public place — on the rim of one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, with seemingly the whole planet watching — is already a nightmare for a generation of biologists, ecologists, climate scientists and progressive wildland firefighters who have spent years trying to sell a wary public on the notion of “good fire.”
Stephen Pyne, a prolific author and renowned environmental historian at Arizona State University, summed up their collective anxiety, saying, “I hope one very bad fire won’t be used to destroy a good policy.”
But the magnitude of the setback for good-fire advocates — especially at a time when federal officials seem actively hostile toward any ideas they view as tree-hugging environmentalism — is hard to overstate.
On July 10, the day before the wind changed, the fire had been burning sleepily for a week without any apparent cause for alarm. The park service confidently posted on social media that it was “no threat to public safety or the developed area” of the North Rim and that the “fire continues to be managed under a confine and contain strategy, which allows for the natural role of fire on the landscape.”
Less than 48 hours later, some 70 buildings, including guest cabins, park administrative offices and employee housing units, had been reduced to ash.
The Dragon Bravo fire burns in this photo supplied by Santa Fe National Forest Engine 651.
(Santa Fe National Forest Engine 651)
One was the Grand Canyon Lodge, originally designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood with a Spanish-style exterior. It was completed in 1928, and then burned down four years later. So Underwood redesigned the structure, creating a more rustic lodge out of the original stonework, perched on the very edge of the canyon. Admirers claimed it had one of the most serene and awe-inspiring views in the world.
By July 12, it was a smoldering ruin.
The front entrance to Grand Canyon Lodge as it appeared on July 18.
(Matt Jenkins / National Park Service)
In the days that followed, tourists on the South Rim of the canyon, and social media viewers around the globe, watched in awe as the fire grew so big and hot it created its own weather, sending pyrocumulus clouds billowing hundreds of feet into the air and dense smoke streaming down into the idyllic canyon below.
As the spectacle raged, and word spread that officials had initially let the small fire burn for the good of the environment, Arizona’s top politicians demanded explanations.
Both of the state’s Democratic senators called for investigations, and Gov. Katie Hobbs, also a Democrat, took to X to demand “intense oversight and scrutiny” of the federal government’s decision “to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.”
The people of Arizona “deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,” Hobbs added.
Tourists take photos as smoke and a pyrocumulus cloud rise at sunset from the Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon as seen from Mather Point near Grand Canyon Village, Ariz., on July 28.
(Jon Gambrell / Associated Press)
Smoke from the Dragon Bravo Fire, seen from the Desert View Watchtower on the Grand Canyon South Rim, on August 11, 2025. (Mikayla Whitmore/For The Times)
Tourists at the Desert View Watchtower on the Grand Canyon South Rim, August 11, 2025. (Mikayla Whitmore/For The Times)
Those tough questions are predictable and fair, said Len Nielson, the staff chief in charge of prescribed burns and environmental protection for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He hopes investigators will be able to identify a specific failure — such as a bad weather forecast — and take concrete steps to prevent the next disaster.
“But I hope we don’t overreact,” he said, and turn away from the notion of good fire. “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
The logic behind intentionally igniting fires on wild land, or simply containing natural fires without attempting to extinguish them, is based on the the fact that fires have long been part of the West’s landscape, and are deemed essential for its ecological health.
Before European settlers arrived in the American West and started suppressing fire at every turn, forests and grasslands burned on a regular basis. Sometimes lightning ignited the flames; sometimes it was Indigenous people using fire as an obvious, and remarkably effective, tool to clear unwanted vegetation from their fields and create better sight lines for hunting. Whatever the cause, it was common for much of the land, including vast tracts in California, to burn about once a decade.
That kept the fuel load in check and, in turn, kept fires relatively calm.
But persuading private landowners and public officials that it’s a good thing to deliberately start fires in their backyards is a constant battle, Nielson said. Even when things go right — which is 99% of the time, he said — smoke can drift into an elementary school or an assisted living facility, testing the patience of local residents.
It took three years to get the necessary permits from air quality regulators and other local authorities for a modest, 50-acre prescribed burn in Mendocino County early this year. The goal was to clear brush from the roads leading out of a University of California research facility so they could be used as emergency exits in the event of an actual wildfire. The main obstacle? Nearby vineyard owners worried the burn would make their world-class grapes too smoky for discerning wine lovers.
Fire danger was still “very high” in Fredonia, AZ, near the Grand Canyon’s north rim, on August 12, 2025. (Mikayla Whitmore/For The Times)
The welcome center at the entrance of the Grand Canyon’s north rim was still wrapped to protect it from fire on August 12, 2025. (Mikayla Whitmore/For The Times)
So the amount of damage control and cajoling it will take to keep things on track after the disaster in Arizona is enough to make a good fire advocate’s head spin.
“It’s always a roll of the dice,” Nielson acknowledged with a sigh. Wind, in particular, is hard to predict, and getting harder with federal cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If they weren’t getting accurate weather predictions in Arizona, that would be a really big deal,” Nielson said.
Riva Duncan, a retired fire chief for the U.S. Forest Service and vice president of the nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, also pointed to federal cuts as a possible contributing factor, specifically the job cuts at the forest and parks service orchestrated by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year.
Although actual firefighters were spared from the firings, and were not eligible for buyouts, crucial support people were let go, including meteorologists and people who specialize in predicting fire behavior.
“So we have fewer people running models, giving forecasts and telling firefighters on the ground what they can expect,” Duncan said.
A National Park Service spokesperson did not respond to questions about the weather forecast, but a review of National Weather Service data and fire weather forecasts issued by NOAA showed only light winds predicted before the flames jumped the containment lines.
Timothy Ingalsbee, another former Forest Service firefighter and the executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said the federal firefighting workforce has been shrinking for years due to an inability to recruit new employees for the remote, grueling work.
But losing so many experienced people this year created a huge and sudden “brain drain,” he said.
It hasn’t helped that this part of Arizona has been struck by severe drought in recent years, with the period from July 2020 to June 2025 being the fifth-warmest and fourth-driest on record, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. In this harsh and remote landscape, the lack of rain has dried up both the desert chaparral and the ponderosa pines and other conifers that occupy the higher elevations of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim — creating a landscape that was primed to ignite.
For Ingalsbee, it seemed reasonable to him to let some of the land burn, especially the steep terrain inside the canyon. “That’s really, really gnarly ground. Why put your people at risk?”
But he was shocked by photos he saw of shrubs growing right up against the windows of the lodge, which is an invitation for disaster during a wildfire. “At some point that glass shatters with the heat and pulsing flame, and then you’ve got pandemonium.”
Pyne said it’s still too soon to say whether the federal workforce’s “downsizing and whimsical firings” had anything to do with the Dragon Bravo’s fire’s disastrous escape. But he can’t help wondering why the people in charge didn’t see it coming.
Trees burned along the road leading to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim on Aug. 12.
(Mikayla Whitmore / For The Times)
The Southwest depends on late summer monsoons to replenish moisture in trees and plants, making them less likely to burn. Every large fire in the region, he said, occurs in the hot, dry period leading up to those monsoon rains.
The Hermit’s Peak fire in New Mexico in 2022, which started with a controlled burn that got out of control and exploded to more than 300,000 acres, becoming Exhibit A for what can go wrong, began in the lead-up to the monsoon, Pyne said. So did several lesser-known fires that escaped in the Grand Canyon over the years, he said.
And the monsoon was already behind schedule this year when officials decided to let the Dragon Bravo fire burn.
“Maybe they knew something I don’t,” Pyne said, “but my sense is that the odds were really against them.”
Pyne, who spent 15 years on a fire crew in the Grand Canyon, has a personal interest in the outcome of the pending Dragon Bravo investigations. Though he doesn’t want a bad fire to destroy a good policy, he said, he also doesn’t want officials to claim they were following a good policy to justify bad decisions.
“Was letting this fire burn within the range of acceptable risks?” Pyne asked. “That seems like a very legitimate line of inquiry.”
HAMILTON — Essex County Greenbelt is hosting its 16th annual trail run Saturday, Aug. 24, at Vineyard Hill Reservation in Hamilton.
Start time is 9 a.m. from the reservation, located on Asbury Street. Registration is $40 for members, $45 for the general public. Online pre-registration ends next Monday, Aug. 19. Race day registration goes from 7:30 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. To register, visit ecga.org/GreenbeltRuns
The scenic course offers runners the opportunity to experience a variety of different elevations and landscapes as they ascend Vineyard Hill and wind through sections of Bradley Palmer State Park, the Bay Circuit Trail, and Greenbelt’s Shaw Field. Both 5K and 10K options are available. Prizes will be awarded for top finishers overall and in each age category.
Proceeds from the Vineyard Hill Trail Run directly support Greenbelt’s conservation and stewardship work, ensuring the preservation of natural landscapes and ecosystems for future generations.
This event is part of the North Shore Trail Series, which has existed since 2010 and features seven of the region’s top off-road races spread over seven months. The goal of this series is to showcase the area’s best trails and support the organizations responsible for their upkeep. The trail series is sponsored by New England Running Company and Salomon.
Greenbelt, based at the Cox Reservation on Eastern Avenue in Essex, works with individuals, families, and communities to protect Essex County’s natural landscapes and ecosystems, safeguarding its unique biodiversity and scenic beauty. To date, Greenbelt has completed more than 700 projects and protected more than 20,000 acres of local land.
Two North Shore road stream crossings, including one in West Newbury, have been selected by the state Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration for future ecological restoration studies.
The culvert replacement sites – one on River Road in West Newbury and the other on Concord Street in Gloucester – were selected due to their vulnerability to coastal erosion, flooding and future sea-level rise, agency said.
Although the culverts are crossing freshwater streams, the division says they are expected to become tidal as sea levels rise, a transition presenting significant challenges for road infrastructure, DER officials said.
The Division of Ecological Restoration announced it is funding and managing future studies at the sites to help the communities, nearby landowners and partners overcome technical challenges and plan for ecological restoration and climate adaptation.
“Ecological restoration provides innumerable benefits,” Fish and Game Commissioner Tom O’Shea said in a prepared statement. “Projects like this will improve public safety, build resilience to sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and mitigate flooding, and restore water quality and wildlife habitat.
“By supporting municipalities and partners, we can scale our efforts to steward a biodiverse and climate ready future.”
“DER looks forward to helping these two communities evaluate and plan for sea-level rise while building resilient, fish-friendly road stream crossings,” Division of Ecological Restoration Director Beth Lambert said in a prepared statement. “Culvert upgrades and other nature-based solutions can be technically challenging and costly for our municipalities to pursue alone. State-municipal partnerships like this are key to successful implementation of ecological restoration and climate adaptation projects.”
In West Newbury, the River Road culvert is on an unnamed stream of the Merrimack River. The crossing faces challenges due to flooding and erosion, and has the potential to be heavily influenced by increased storms and sea level rise.
Conducting models of the way water moves at the culvert site and investigating potential ecological improvements through restoration would enable a systematic approach to improving infrastructure and natural resource resiliency, the state said.
In Gloucester, the Concord Street culvert is along a tributary of Walker Creek.
The DER indicated the culvert is affected by coastal storms and is at an increased risk for erosion and flooding. The replacement of the culvert with a structure of resilient design would address flood water retention and bank stabilization and sedimentation; improve fish passage and wildlife habitat; and increase climate resilience by preparing for sea level rise, storm surge, and coastal marsh mitigation.
A 2019 technical report called “Great Marsh Barrier Mitigation: A comprehensive program to mitigate aquatic barriers in the Great Marsh Area of Critical Environmental Concern region” by the Ipswich River Watershed Association looked at the single culvert on Concord Street, among many other “priority barriers” in the region.
“The site has been identified as a site that has experienced flooding and ranked as having poor aquatic organism passage in the (North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaboration) Tidal Crossing Assessment,” the report said. It singled out the culvert as having “no passage due to rock piles/undersized structures.”
On a cool, cloudy morning one day last week, Albert Rivas approached a pile of dry wood in the Angeles National Forest and set it on fire.
The pile roared to life, and within minutes, it was spewing flames at least 10 feet tall. Rivas, a firefighter with the United States Forest Service, paused briefly to admire his handiwork before aiming his gasoline- and diesel-filled drip torch at another pile nearby.
By morning’s end, he and more than a dozen other Forest Service firefighters had burned about 17 acres’ worth of woody material around the Lower San Antonio Fire Station at the base of Mt. Baldy — a forest management feat they attributed to favorable weather and fuel conditions.
“It’s all about going at it the right way, correctly, with all the techniques,” Rivas said as smoke swirled around him.
A U.S. Forest Service fire crew stands behind the smoking remnants of a controlled burn.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
This year has indeed been favorable for Southern California firefighters. Heavy rains in winter — as well as a rare tropical storm in August — put an end to three years of punishing drought and made the landscape far less likely to burn.
“It was a fairly mild year,” said Robert Garcia, fire chief of the Angeles National Forest. “The fire season started later and, throughout most of the state, ended early. That provided us some reprieve from that intensity to our workforce, but also some tremendous opportunity this year to get out there and do more treatment on the landscape.”
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In 2023, there were 92 confirmed fires in the Angeles National Forest, the largest of which was about 420 acres. Statewide, firefighters responded to nearly 6,900 blazes that collectively burned about 320,000 acres, according to data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
That’s a far cry from 2020 and 2021, the state’s two worst fire years on record, which together saw nearly 7 million acres burn, including California’s first million-acre fire.
U.S. Forest Service firefighters burn piles of forest debris below Mt. Baldy.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
Garcia attributed much of this year’s tameness to the rains, which ended the “off the charts” dryness that had plagued the landscape in recent years, priming it to burn. What’s more, the weather freed up resources across the state, meaning more crews were able to prepare for fires and respond when they ignited, keeping the numbers small. Some Southern California crews even deployed to assist with larger fires in Oregon, Washington and Canada.
But a mild year is not a year off, he said, and the outlook for 2024 could be affected by the damp conditions this year, which spurred tons of “green-up” in the form of new grasses and vegetation across the region and the state.
“There’s always trade-offs,” Garcia said. “One of the primary benefits [of the rain] is restoring some of the vegetation cycles, but generally speaking, depending on when Mother Nature turns that spigot off, it’s really a matter of how fast those fuels are going to dry out.”
The current seasonal outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration calls for wetter-than-normal conditions in California through at least February, which forecasters say may be supercharged by El Niño. But once the rains stop, all that new vegetation could be fuel for next year’s conflagrations.
Piles of debris burn on a forested hillside.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
Still, there is no denying this year was beneficial. In the 2023 fiscal year — Oct. 1, 2022, through Sept. 30 — the Forest Service performed mechanical treatments on 261,000 acres of federal forestland in the state. Mechanical treatment includes wood chipping, mastication and removal of trees, branches, leaves, biomass and other material from the forest, which has built up in recent decades and can feed flames.
Forest Service crews in the state also conducted prescribed fires covering 51,614 acres, or fires that are intentionally set to clear out that same material. Firefighters in the Angeles National Forest were able to conduct prescribed burns all the way into June, which they have not been able to do for several years due to drought conditions, and resumed operations in October.
“Fire season historically has ended around November and started up again in May,” said David Gabaldon, a forestry fuels technician with the Forest Service and the “burn boss” at last week’s prescribed burn. “The last probably 10 years now, we’ve almost become a year-round fire department, or fire management group, due to other events like global warming and weather.”
He noted that he recently returned from a prescribed burn in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, which had been “almost unheard of” in recent years because of the dry conditions.
Like Garcia, Gabaldon was concerned about the new growth this year. The grass was “coming back so quick that we would clear it, and then within two or three months during sprouting season, it would come right back up,” he said. “It’s like doing your yard.”
He hoped that the pile burns last week would act as a reminder to neighboring communities that defensible space efforts and home hardening projects can help protect them during a blaze.
Forest Service crews conducted prescribed fires covering 51,614 acres in California all the way into June, which they have not been able to do for several years due to drought conditions.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
“We’ve got to be the role model, so this is exactly what we’re trying to do here,” he said. “This is good defensible space around our own buildings.”
But challenges remain. Though the agency treated about 313,000 acres in the state this fiscal year, California is home to approximately 33 million acres of forestland — about 19 million acres of which are federally managed. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection treated about 91,000 acres this year.
What’s more, recent research published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment indicates that climate change is narrowing the window for prescribed burns in the Western United States.
As the planet warms, severe short-term drought will continue to combine with a long-term drying effect known as aridification to reduce adequate burn conditions in the region, the study found, “raising concerns that climate change will add to the many existing challenges to prescribed fire implementation.” By 2060, California could see an additional month or more each year when prescribed burns will be too dangerous.
The Forest Service is also grappling with a retention issue as crews fight for a permanent pay increase from the federal government. Base pay for some firefighters starts at as little as $15 an hour, and thousands have threatened to walk off the force if the pay increase is not finalized.
Garcia said so far, he has been able to maintain staffing levels on the Angeles National Forest, but he hoped to see a resolution soon.
Approximately 17 acres’ worth of material around the Lower San Antonio Fire Station was cleared during the recent controlled burn at the base of Mt. Baldy in Southern California.
(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
At the same time, teams have benefited from a national wildfire crisis strategy introduced by the Biden administration, he said. The 10-year strategy includes congressional funding geared toward increasing the pace and scale of forest treatments, among other efforts. The strategy has identified Southern California as a priority landscape, Garcia said.
At the pile burn last week, crews were optimistic about such efforts. Mark Muñoz, a suppression battalion chief, said a fire recently sparked in an area of the forest that had been treated earlier in the season, and was quickly extinguished.
“Fighting fire in a treated area versus a non-treated area? Extremely important and crucial,” he said.
Muñoz added that while it may have seemed like a mild season from the outside, the work is nonstop.
“When we’re not fighting fire, we’re not hanging out on the sofa and watching TV — we’re out here cutting with chainsaws and hand tools, and we’re over here doing prescribed fire,” he said, motioning to the smoldering piles around him. “So 12 months out of the year, we’re still technically fighting fire. Because this is still fighting fire.”
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Today’s post features a well-known landscape along Minnesota’s North Shore … the Split Rock Lighthouse.
While touring the North Shore area a few years ago, I was able to photograph the lighthouse at sunrise. After a few minutes of shooting, the view got much more interesting as fog slowly rose along the cliff walls and began to cover the lighthouse:
Canon 1D Mark 3 camera body + Canon 70-200mm, f/2.8 IS lens + Canon 1.4x TC, shot at 280mm
