Mesa Verde Fire Doubles in Size to 3,500 Acres

Fire crews called in reinforcements to battle a 3,500-acre wildfire that doubled in size Friday, spreading quickly across tinder-dry mesas and canyons and forcing the evacuation of 1,000 tourists from Mesa Verde National Park.

About 350 firefighters, aided by slurry bombers, were fighting flames in rugged, steep terrain on the eastern boundary of the park, about 260 miles southwest of Denver.

Wind-whipped flames sent a gray curtain of smoke into the sky Friday.

“Oh, my! It’s grown,” said Jane Anderson, who works for the park and lives nearby.

The fire was not threatening any of the cliff dwellings and mesa villages built by Pueblo Indians up to 1,400 years ago.

But 14 archeologists traveling with fire crews discovered some new archeological sites--mounds of rubble that once were walls--that were exposed when the flames burned away vegetation.

The fire, apparently caused by lightning, broke out on the eastern boundary of the 52,000-acre park on Thursday. It raced through juniper, pinyon and oak brush, burning within a mile of the single road through the area.

National Park Service officials said the park would probably remain off-limits to tourists through the weekend.

The canyon walls are so steep that firefighters had difficulty reaching the flames. Officials said the fire was so intense it was creating powerful updrafts, in effect making its own weather rather than being pushed by winds.

Elsewhere in the West, firefighters conquered two wildfires that blackened more than 100,000 acres of remote range land in north-central Nevada.

But their comrades remained busy on two other large fires--a blaze about 200 miles northeast of Reno that had grown to 10,000 acres and a fire exceeding 4,000 acres in central Nevada.

Meanwhile, the fire that burned more than 47,000 acres, leveled more than 200 homes and burned portable buildings at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory was finally extinguished completely.

The fire began with a prescribed burn set May 4 by the Park Service. The cost of fighting it has been pegged at $8.6 million.

Nearly 56,000 fires have burned 2.8 million acres across the nation this season, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho. That is the highest total since 1996.