Smoke, sprinklers, aluminum foil: Fighting fire on the Olympic Peninsula

Extreme heat launched the Bear Gulch Fire across 2,000 additional acres of forest on Tuesday and Wednesday, pouring thick smoke on the Hood Canal communities of Hoodsport and Skokomish, Washington.

Above the smoke, a miles-high pyrocumulus cloud formed, visible from Ocean Shores to Whatcom County.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Bear Gulch Fire had burned about 8,300 acres of Olympic National Forest and Olympic National Park above the Lake Cushman reservoir since starting July 6. Some 700 firefighters and support crew are working to put it out.

On Tuesday morning, the air quality index at Hoodsport neared 600, deep into the “hazardous” zone, while on the Skokomish Reservation, it reached 170, in the “unhealthy” zone.

“Oh, it's terrible,” Skokomish Tribe CEO Tom Strong said Tuesday. “The smoke just has kind of settled across the land, and it's been like that now for a couple of days in a row. It had been intermittent before, but the last several days here have been a struggle.”

Christie Chambless, manager of the tribe’s language department, said she has missed days at work because the smoke triggers her migraines.

“It's heartbreaking seeing our homelands burning, seeing our elders and young ones suffering from the smoke,” Chambless said by email. “I am very thankful for the firefighters who are working tirelessly to put out the fire.”

On Saturday, at the Skokomish Tribe’s annual first-salmon and first-elk ceremony, honoring animals the tribe relies on, tribal elders received air purifiers in addition to traditional foods and gifts.

Strong said the tribe is also keeping its community center and an events center at its casino open until 9 p.m. each night as refuges from smoke and heat for the reservation community of about 500 people.

“There's folks who are sick with several different maladies at this point right now, and the smoke certainly isn't helping those,” he said.

The Olympic Region Clean Air Agency issued an air quality alert for Mason County through Friday morning.

U.S. Forest Service officials say the fire started on a Sunday evening, at the end of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, at Bear Gulch Day Use Area, a popular beach and picnic spot on Lake Cushman just outside the Staircase entrance to Olympic National Park.

Since no lightning was reported in the area, officials consider this fire to be human-caused. The Forest Service is asking the public to share any information that might help them track down who started the fire.

Whoever or whatever ignited this blaze, months of drought have turned much of Washington state into a tinderbox.

In the three months leading up to the fire, Lake Cushman received 30% of its normal 9.4 inches of rainfall, according to Washington State Climatologist Guillaume Mauger.

Incident command spokesperson Don Ferguson said the fuel, as wildland firefighters call vegetation, above Lake Cushman is at the 98th percentile of dryness over the past 30 years.

“It's explosively dry,” Ferguson said.

Firefighters have been wrapping historic buildings and structures in the Staircase area of Olympic National Park in aluminum-fiberglass foil.

About a mile up the Staircase Rapids Loop Trail from there, all the wooden parts of a suspension bridge across the North Fork Skokomish River now wear a shiny silver cloak.

“It's pretty much the same stuff that fire shelters are made out of, that firefighters carry,” Ferguson said. “It can protect you from [heat] radiation, but a direct flame will eventually break it down.”

The Staircase ranger station and nearby buildings were built between 1929 and 1934. Crews have set up sprinklers that run around the clock near some structures.

“We’ve got plenty of water here," Ferguson said. "That's a good thing."

Ferguson said 29 structures have been wrapped in foil.

Firefighters have also wrapped three large Douglas-firs deemed especially valuable as bird-nesting habitat.

Elsewhere, heavy machinery has been cutting down, digging up, and chewing up trees and other vegetation to create fire lines and “defensible spaces” for firefighters to work from should the flames spread toward roads and buildings.

Fire officials said there have been no serious injuries and no buildings lost. Tacoma Public Utilities officials said hydropower production from 99-year-old Cushman Dam has not been affected.

With intense fire-fighting effort near Lake Cushman, the Bear Gulch Fire has been spreading mostly uphill, into steep, federally protected wilderness areas, where there are few permanent structures and fire is a natural, if infrequent, part of forest ecosystems.

“They definitely do burn,” said Crystal Raymond, a research scientist with the University of Washington and the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative . “But we're talking more like a 200- to 500-year return interval.”

Fire officials say Bear Gulch is the biggest fire on the Olympic Peninsula since the Great Forks Fire of 1951, which burned 38,000 acres.

The Delabarre Fire, Olympic National Park's largest fire before 2025, burned 4,200 acres in the upper Elwha watershed in 2023, while the Paradise Fire burned 2,800 acres of rainforest in the Queets River valley in 2015.

Fire is a different beast in the lush groves of western Washington than it is in the rest of the American West, where forests naturally burn frequently unless firefighters repeatedly squelch them. Decades of fire suppression have left forests in the inland West thick with fuel and prone to more destructive burning, especially as global warming leaves forests hotter and drier.

Raymond says that pattern doesn’t hold on the Olympic Peninsula, where fires are so infrequent that firefighting has left little mark on the landscape.

“We're starting to see that climate signal there just in how dry things are getting and how long our fire seasons are,” she said. “But we just don't really have the evidence of more frequent fires.”

Ferguson said because the Bear Gulch Fire was started by humans, managers are legally obligated to suppress it, though the effort is heavily focused on protecting buildings.

Olympic National Park policy allows land managers to approach different areas of a fire in different ways: fighting it near buildings, for example, while letting it burn through wildlands for its ecological benefits.

“In the park, in the wilderness, you can do more damage with fire suppression than the fire is doing,” Ferguson said.

Firefighters have not been using fire retardant on the Bear Gulch blaze because of its toxicity to salmon and other fish.

One indirect form of fire suppression has altered the Olympic Peninsula over the years: The forced removal of Native Americans from their land caused the intentional use of fire to manage landscapes to all but disappear.

“It's a big part of Skokomish tradition,” Tom Strong said. “It was the only way to encourage and ensure camas would grow in a territory like ours.”

Intentional burning also opened up grazing habitat for deer and elk, important foods for the Skokomish to this day.

“It was a practice that was well known to our people, was common, and was maintained until treaty times,” Strong said.

Many Washington tribes signed treaties with the U.S. government in the 1850s, giving up most of their lands in exchange for promises of education, health care, and continued access to fish and game in their traditional territories.

Rain, in the forecast for Thursday and Friday, should dampen but not extinguish the Bear Gulch Fire.

“It will not put it out. We're certain of that. The fuels are so heavy and so dry,” Ferguson said. “A season-ending event here is considered to be several inches of rain over a week.”