San Bernardino County Blaze Still on the Move : Destruction: Officials say the fire, which has already blackened 52,000 acres, is spreading in all directions.

The West’s largest wildfire burned out of control in San Bernardino County on Tuesday, spreading in all directions despite the efforts of more than 1,400 firefighters.

Kristel Johnson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service, said the wind-driven blaze, which has blackened more than 52,000 acres and damaged about a dozen dwellings and 40 outbuildings, was continuing to threaten isolated ranch homes in the Lucerne and Apple valleys to the north and mountain resort cabins near Green Valley Lake and Running Springs to the south.

The fire is only 20% contained, fire officials said.

“This is a tough one,” U. S. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said after visiting the fire command center at the Snow Valley ski resort. The Forest Service, which is providing a major share of the personnel battling the so-called Willows fire, is the biggest arm of the Department of Agriculture.

The gusting winds carried smoke from the Willows fire as far as Las Vegas, 180 miles from the center of the blaze.

“The sunrise this morning was blood red. It was gorgeous,” said Bob Leinbach, a spokesman for the Clark County, Nev., Fire Department.

Another fire remained out of control in Los Angeles County on Tuesday, gnawing slowly through thickets of brush in mountainous terrain near the junction of the east and west forks of the San Gabriel River north of Glendora.

That blaze, which damaged three cabins in the Angeles National Forest near Rincon and forced the evacuation of 4,000 campers, had charred about 3,000 acres by nightfall Tuesday.

Four other Southern California fires appeared under control.

A 3,600-acre blaze in the rugged Sierra Pelona Hills near Acton was declared fully contained Monday night after destroying three sheds and a house, and a four-acre fire was knocked down Tuesday afternoon after damaging a building on Indiana Avenue in La Canada Flintridge.

Two fires in the San Jacinto Mountains of Riverside County--a 3,000-acre blaze near Mountain Center and a 1,500-acre blaze near Poppet Flats--were largely contained by midday Tuesday.

At least 15 other wildfires burned in Northern California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana and Washington, but weather conditions there appeared to be improving, and none of the blazes were as big or as threatening as the Willows fire in San Bernardino County.

Eight water-dropping helicopters, eight fixed-wing air tankers, more than 100 fire engine crews and hundreds of firefighters armed with hand tools were deployed against the blaze that sprawled from the ridge tops of the San Bernardino Mountains to the High Desert slopes of the Apple and Lucerne valleys.

Scores of vacationers and year-round residents fled before the advancing flames, many of them taking refuge in shelters set up at local high schools. Five people were arrested Monday on suspicion of looting abandoned homes.

“The hottest spot today was in the Big Pine Flats area, northwest of Fawnskin,” Hal Seyden, a Forest Service spokesman, said Tuesday. “We lost a lot of timber there.”

Seyden said that despite long hours battling the blaze in difficult terrain, the army of firefighters, many of whom had been redeployed to the Willows blaze after fighting fires elsewhere, was holding up well. There were only five reports of minor injuries.

Associated Press contributed to this story.