Longs Pass, Lake Ingalls & Esmeralda Basin (Esmerelda) — Monday, Sep. 29, 2025

September 29 (4:10 pm): Winds are pushing this fire E and NE. Size has increased by 10,000 plus acres.  Rain will help, the question remains, how much?

* See new closure map that includes USFS and DNR lands

* Recommended web sites: https://wasmoke.blogspot.com/ , https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6cdda73cf6154949a1fae76ccb2900a0 , and https://inciweb.wildfire.gov/incident-closures/waowf-labor-mountain-fire .

Note: To the SW of the Labor Mountain fire, is the remains of the August 2017 Jolly Mountain Fire -- this can border can be easily seen at the confluence of Johnson Creek and the North Fork of the Teanaway. NE, E, and SE of the current fire are other older fires.  These can make nice fire breaks or because of the nature of remain fuels, can be excellent places for the fire to grow and expand.

September 26: Strong winds associated with the passage of a cold front on September 25 brought about a 10,604 acre or a 16.6 square mile increase in size of the Labor Mountain fire (see scaled Figure 2: two summits are indicated for comparison purposes and these are Iron Peak and Iron Mountain [also known as Iron Bear]).  Hopefully the 'promised' rain of the coming days will help otherwise waiting for snow may be the only end to this fire as well as the others.  

Closure of this area and perhaps some of the area around the Sourdough Moutain fire will put a lot of pressure on the Highway 20 subalpine larch viewing hikes.  Not a pretty picture.  As an aside, soon after coming over Washington Pass yesterday, a ridge facing east on the north side of the highway had a line of subalpine larch that was beginning to show clearly autumn colors.

September 24: With the new DNR heat map shows consider fire growth and heat upslope of the North Fork Road between Stafford and Beverly Creeks (see 'oval').  These changes are mostly likely due to back-firing where fuels are being ignited by firefighting personnel in order to reduce fuels and thus create a fire.  Red dots and lots of red dots on the opposite side of fire-lines likely indicate that the line has no longer held. However, it is important to remember the spatial scale of these dots (satellite derived dots are somewhere in a 1 x 1 km pixel.  The heat dot is mapped in the middle of the pixel although the actual fire producing the heat might be in the upper NW corner of that pixel).  If the dots are derived from airplanes or drones, pixel sizes decrease dramatically.

I encourage everyone to use the DNR Fire Dashboard (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/6cdda73cf6154949a1fae76ccb2900a0 ) and to acquire the 'free' app entitled 'Watch Duty' -- it covers western US and you can either notifications sent to your phone by either selecting a fire or a county or region.  In addition, you can subscribe to receive your county's emergency alerts.  Can be critical in a least three noted cases in the last decade where relatively small fires grew and moved either south or down valley at speeds faster than most of us can run.

September 23: Just on the doorstep of fantastic autumn colors, the Labor Mountain fire blows up over the weekend.  Highway 97 is closed and the North Fork of the Teanaway Road is also closed.  This is one of my favor places in the Cascades, I have visited here almost a 100 times between the summer of 1967 and May 2025 (class field trip to Iron Peak) with family, friends, and students from the UW.  You will find the DNR fire map for September 23, 2025 with colored dots that indicate the location of heat and its intensity by both the size of the dot and the intensity of red.  Peaks such as Miller, Earl, Navaho, Jester, and Iron Bear have been previously visited by me and now this fire!

I have added the most recent USFS closure map for the area impacted by the fire including the North Fork of the Teanaway as well as the current USFS Fire Extent map.  The black line is the 'containment' fire line.