The Pioneer Fire of 2016

The mosaic of burned and living timber across these ridges is the work of the Pioneer Fire. It began on July eighteenth, twenty sixteen, when smoke was spotted in the Boise National Forest a few miles north of Idaho City. Hot weather and strong winds drove it hard.

By early August it had grown past sixty thousand acres, and by mid-September it covered more than a hundred and eighty thousand. Before containment arrived in November, the fire had burned about a hundred and eighty-eight thousand acres, nearly three hundred square miles, making it the largest wildfire on national forest land in the country that year. Almost a thousand firefighters worked the lines, at a cost approaching a hundred million dollars.

The fire did not burn evenly. It left a patchwork of scorched crowns, untouched islands, and everything in between, the signature of a landscape shaped by flame.