Months before wildfires sweep across the West each year, Lois Gruver packs a suitcase with pictures of her four children and her favorite paintings. She's always ready to sling it into her trunk if flames head toward her home in Bend, Ore.
``One lightning strike .... You just better be ready and hope it never comes,'' said Gruver, 69, whose neighborhood is surrounded by juniper trees.
The fire season has been a mild one so far for people in the West. Fires in California, Arizona and Nevada have made headlines, but the 1 million acres that have burned in the Lower 48 states is about half the national average this late in the summer.
But national statistics show this has been one of the worst fire seasons in years. The reason, in a word, is Alaska.
The state is having one of its worst seasons in decades, with 3.5 million acres of remote and unpopulated forest already charred. That is the bulk of the 4.4 million acres of forest that have burned this year, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
But the balance is likely to shift soon, forecasters warn. They say the worst is yet to come for the continental United States, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
``Right now probably the Lower 48 has been a little slower than normal in terms of not as many fires, not as many acres, as we normally have,'' said Rick Ochoa, national fire weather program manager for the Bureau of Land Management in Boise, Idaho. ``We really haven't had, up until recently, very hot weather in the West. ... We've had some rains from time to time that brought a little bit of moisture to the fuels.''
Alaska wildfires have a quirky nature all their own.
Light rain showers have little effect on hot fires in Alaska, because the fast-burning black spruce of its forests tend to be near quick-drying moss and lichen.
``They could burn again 20 minutes after it stopped raining,'' said Pat Garbutt, a fire behavior analyst from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
Alaska also has long summer days - 21 hours in parts of the Interior - meaning less overnight humidity to calm fires. And fire managers say it's sometimes difficult to find fires.
``One of the biggest challenges here is trying to detect fires in such a large expanse,'' said Allen Chrisman of Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and incident commander of the 200,000-acre Wolf Creek fire northeast of Fairbanks. ``The scale here is so incredible it's out of whack with anything in the Lower 48. One mile there is like 500 miles here.''
Because of Alaska's vast land, limited highways and small population, fires are usually just allowed to burn unless they threaten people or structures. That means more land will burn than in the more populated West.
Currently, Alaska has about 107 fires burning, but only 20 are being fought.
``The cost to get around these fires and do the same thing they do down in the Lower 48 would be just enormous,'' said Gil Knight, spokesman for the Alaska Fire Service in Fairbanks.
Officials note Alaska is near the usual end of its season, which they hope will come on schedule. But in the Lower 48, forecasters say, the fires will come, and this year still is likely to be a bad one.
The Pacific Northwest is just now approaching critical fire danger, Ochoa said. Fire season shifts from different parts of the West throughout the summer and usually doesn't begin in the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies until about now and runs through mid-September. Wildfires in southern California usually pick up around late summer.
``It's starting to crank up here,'' said Paul Werth, fire weather program manager at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center in Portland, Ore. ``It's drying out very rapidly.''
Homeowners in Gruver's neighborhood have trimmed trees and bushes and used a chipper to make mulch out of the brush.
``You keep your lawn watered a lot and hopefully you've done a good cleanup,'' she said.
And, of course, her suitcase is ready to go.
