<\/p>\n
Crews from multiple agencies including the Dove Creek Volunteer Fire Department, Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service worked Tuesday to put out hot spots and reinforce the containment line around a wildfire west of Cahone.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday afternoon, the fire was extinguished, said Pleasant View Fire Chief Jeff Yoder.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe will continue to monitor for hot spots,\u201d he said. \u201cAll the agencies worked well together fighting this fire. Having the air support early on was crucial.\u201d<\/p>\n
By midmorning Tuesday, the fire was smoldering and smoking on 21 acres of private land near County Road N a few miles west of U.S. Highway 491 in Dolores County.<\/p>\n
Dan Kaufenberg, BLM incident commander for the fire, said the goal was to reach full containment Tuesday and turn the fire over to local agencies if it didn\u2019t grow. He estimated that the fire was 70 percent contained on Tuesday afternoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are mopping up hot spots and securing containment lines,\u201d he said Tuesday during a short tour with The Journal.<\/p>\n
\u201cEfforts by local departments, air support, and the winds dying down last night helped us out,\u201d said Logan Davis, a BLM incident commander trainee.<\/p>\n
But when the fire was discovered Monday evening, fire behavior was high, Kaufenberg said, with flames 20 to 30 feet high in the trees and 5 to 8 feet high in the sagebrush.<\/p>\n
There was concern that the fire would spread out of Alkali Draw and into adjacent canyons, where it could have been pushed northeast by winds toward structures and homes a mile away.<\/p>\n
Air support was called in Monday evening, and a helicopter and two single-engine air tankers dropped retardant on the fire, according to Grant Allen of the Dove Creek Fire Department.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, 40 to 50 firefighters battled the blaze, including an Interagency Hotshot crew. The fire burned on private land about a half-mile northeast of the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument\u2019s border.<\/p>\n
No road closures or evacuation orders were given, and no structure damage was reported.<\/p>\n
Dolores County road crews provided water tankers and a D8-R dozer that plowed containment lines.<\/p>\n
Jake Kline, Dove Creek Volunteer Fire Department chief, said that when he arrived Monday afternoon the fire was torching trees, and the wind was swirling.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow we\u2019ve got a line all the way around and are reinforcing it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was going pretty good, and multiple agencies jumped on it hard,\u201d said Ralph Sublett, a volunteer with the Egnar-Slickrock Fire Department. \u201cIt had the potential to really take off.\u201d<\/p>\n
Firefighters were called to the scene about 5 p.m. Monday. The fire began in pi\u00f1on-juniper brush around Alkali Draw, then quickly spread north-northeast, fed by south-southwest winds, said Patrick Seekins, fire management officer of the Dolores Ranger District of the San Juan National Forest.<\/p>\n
Seekins credited a heavy and fast response for the firefighters\u2019 success. \u201cWe had a lot of aviation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The fire was blamed on a lightning strike. Allen reported that Dove Creek firefighters extinguished a \u201clittle smoker\u201d on Sunday after a lightning strike, but that a flyover in the afternoon failed to find evidence of another fire.<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service forecasts continued dry, hot weather through Monday, with daytime high temperatures in the upper 80s and overnight lows in the lower 50s.<\/p>\n
This article will be updated as more information becomes available.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ground crews \u2018jumped on it hard,\u2019 firefighter says<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":99378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5736,5735],"tags":[4355,13,554],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-99377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news","tag-cahone","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-pleasant-view"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99377"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=99377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}