York fire in Mojave Desert balloons to 77,000 acres
A wildfire blazing along the Southern Californianevada border, burning through delicate Joshua Tree forests, continued to swell Monday — becoming the state’s largest of the fire season.
The desert fire had scorched 77,000 acres as of early Monday, with 0% containment. After first being observed Friday, the blaze — dubbed the York fire — has spread mainly across the Mojave National Preserve in eastern San Bernardino County, California, but recently jumped into western Nevada. No evacuations have been issued as a result of the fire, which is burning in mostly remote areas.
“It’s a public misconception that the desert doesn’t burn, but we’re seeing right here that that’s not case,” said Sierra Willoughby, a supervisory park ranger at Mojave National Preserve. “They’re not as rare as we would hope them to be.”
Just 10 days before this wildfire was spotted in the
New York Mountains area of the Mojave National Preserve, park officials warned of extreme fire risk for the federally protected desert, banning all open flames.
“Even though we had a good moisture year with the [winter] season, the very high temperatures that came in July were a concern for our fire folks,” Willoughby said.
Southern California’s wet winter and cool spring helped foster increasing levels of invasive grasses and underbrush in the Mojave and Colorado deserts, federal officials said, which has made the region exceptionally susceptible to brush fires this summer.
This year’s climate patterns have provided a “more continuous fuel bed” than is typical for desert ecosystems, UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain said on Twitter.
“Big fires in the desert are entirely consistent with the fire season outlook for 2023,” Swain wrote, and that poses a major concern for ecologists and desert conservationists. Joshua trees and other desert plants have limited natural defenses to fires, federal officials said, and would struggle to recover from such blazes.
The extent of the plants and animals at risk in the York fire are still under investigation, Willoughby said, noting that the blaze has already burned through Joshua tree forests and juniper and pinyon pine groves. Stephanie Bishop, a spokesperson for the York fire, said endangered tortoises that live in the region also could be harmed.
“What we’ve seen is fires go through these areas and take out quite a bit,” Willoughby said. The York fire is burning in some of the areas that last saw flames in 2005 from the Hackberry fire, which then burned about 2,500 acres. Willoughby said many of the forests harmed in that blaze 18 years ago still have not recovered.
California’s other big fire of the year — the Bonny fire, which has charred 2,300 acres in Riverside County — is also burning across some arid landscapes as well as through the mountains.