Damp Day Aids Crews on Yellowstone Fire Lines

Firefighters took advantage of chilly, damp weather Monday to strengthen lines around fires that have ravaged nearly a million acres inside the park, but hot, dry weather was predicted by midweek.

Fire activity was limited Monday after a weekend of showers and light snow--the first significant precipitation since spring--that gave firefighters a needed break from high wind and temperatures that let fires grow by thousands of acres per day last week.

The fires inside the 2.2-million-acre park had burned 939,270 acres as of Monday.

“It’s a sleeping giant now,” Denny Bungarz, a fire incident commander, said during a briefing Monday. “We want to tie it down so when it wakes up it can’t run on us.”

Humidity at 50%

Temperatures remained in the 40s in the park Monday, keeping humidity levels at up to 50%, but the weather was expected to begin clearing today and temperatures were to reach 70 degrees by Wednesday, drying the area once again.

The favorable weather allowed Yellowstone officials to open all roads through the park Monday except its northeastern entrance leading to Cooke City, Mont.; the route inside the park from Mammoth Hot Springs to Canyon and Tower, and Craig Pass.

Smoke from the forest fires has drifted as far as the East Coast, turning sunsets a fiery red and even affecting the weather.

The setting sun “had a kind of an eerie appearance,” said Allan Morrison of the National Weather Service in Chicago, about 1,200 miles east of the fires. The hazy smoke made the sun look like “a big glowing red ball . . . it was a very red color which made it spectacular in that regard.”

The smoke was trapped in an upper atmospheric trough, about 15,000 to 20,000 feet up, and was carried by wind over the Great Lakes, toward the East Coast and out to sea, said meteorologist Joe Harrison of the weather service in New York City.

The thin layer of smoke passed over the New York area Sunday, dimming the sun.