Pine Mountain Escaped Burn

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:01]Hey everyone, welcome back to the lookout. It's May. This is our uh second live stream of the year for active fire.

[00:00:10]We're looking at the Pine Mountain Escape prescribed burn in eastern Oregon about 15 miles southeast of Bend, Oregon. This started off as a prescribed burn and uh it sounds like this morning they decided it was too dry and conditions weren't good to keep lighting but uh fire they had already put on the ground took off today and um is putting up a big column and so we're going to look at the geography where it's burning, what we think is going to happen. Uh but first a word from our sponsor.

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[00:01:29]All right. So, if you're just joining us for the first time, this is the Lookout Channel. My name is Zeke Lunderer. live in Northern California and I've been working in fire and fuels and mapping um for about 30 years and this is what I do is I uh pick apart what's happening on fires and bring it to you with some maps and intel. So, we're going to jump right into the maps. Uh if you want to check out our archive, check out this um check out the YouTube channel, like and subscribe and let's go to the map. So, where we at? Um, here's the here's Band, Oregon up here.

[00:02:07]We're on the east side of the Cascade Mountains.

[00:02:10]Central Oregon, desert, right? So, why is eastern Oregon dry? You got the big coast range here and the storms come off the ocean. They raise up over the mountains and it all the moisture falls out on the west side. It's nice and wet and lush and rainforesty. And over here, you might as well be in Ealaka, Eastern Montana is dry, dry as bone. So if you come into this burn here, we see this purple area is area that the Forest Service has been um working on burning.

[00:02:46]The Pine Mountain underburn. We're going to change that to a little prominent color.

[00:02:56]All right. And so they were burning down in here in the kind of south end of the unit looked like. And they had three different units out here in this project. Uh it sounds like it totals about 2,000 acres. This area is kind of this island of pine forest, pine mountain. There's been history of large fires out in here um back kind of early in the 20th century. And then this fire here burned last year, the Pine Fire 2024.

[00:03:27]And so looks like what happened is got this kind of we're out in the desert and you've got they're burning in the southern end here. And it looks like we got kind of strong west winds and the fire.

[00:03:40]This is kind of the it's pretty coarse data, but this is the heat satellite data that was captured today, this afternoon at about 900 p.m. about 2 pm this afternoon.

[00:03:54]And so these columns when you have big smoke column um these satellites are way out in space seeing a long long distance and um they kind of see the smoke way up in the column and they kind of hallucinate. So when you see these big widely spread heat signatures usually it means that those are coming from the heat in the column and that they overestimate where the fire is. The fire is burning out here and what it looks like is it's mainly burning in grass like uh cheat grass, other grasslands like it came out of this southern end where they're burning and kind of squirted out into this grassland. And we know that fires move as fast as the wind and grass. So now the fire is going to run into this area that burned last year. So what we'd expect is that because it burned just last year, there's not a lot of thatch.

[00:04:40]There's not multiple years of dead grass out here in his burn scar.

[00:04:44]Um, not going to be a lot of fuel.

[00:04:45]Probably fire is probably not going to go very far in this grass. The good news is that the fire doesn't appear right now to have really like burned up this uh much of this pine stand that they were initially treating. So that's good because when you look at like what fire has done to you know pine on the ragged edge of u its habitat you know as you go farther out here um to the east you get less and less trees because it's dry and you get sage brush and you know your trees kind of grow up in your high country. So we always worry about fires burning in the east side just kind of burning up what's left of uh everything that has already burned.

[00:05:26]So, so far so good. And that the fire that blew up today is kind of running mainly into grass. And uh, you know, a lot of us worry less about grass than we do about burning up the the remaining timber.

[00:05:38]We got some webcam stuff to show you here. Um, this the lookout website.

[00:05:45]This is kind of um 12 hours of fire spread today. Starts out the day and it's really pixelated time stamp. Can't really see what's happening, but this is 10 in the morning. So, here about 11 o'clock, they turned the camera around because there was something worth seeing, which was the fire blowing over the hill. You can see this recent burn scar out in here. Just bunch of standing dead and um a lot there. You can see it looks like they uh maybe came with retardant and pre-treated this uh webcam because here kind of late in the day, you start seeing a pew Got FOS check on the on the camera.

[00:06:29]There's another view here. Um same mountain, different camera. I'm not sure what it'll show us that's different.

[00:06:36]Just uh good dramatic smoke blowing up.

[00:06:39]You can see that the fire here is crowning uh in the timber. And so like I said, I think it mainly blew out into the grassland. But um I think what we're seeing there is like the fire is kind of crowning along u this ridgetop towards the camera. So hopefully what'll happen overnight is that the fire will u lay down and it'll back down toward this road and might even get some good fire effects out of it. U prescribed fire like effects. But um it's really dry. I mean it's all really dry in eastern Oregon. But uh if we look at our weather here, we see that um today the minimum humidity is 26, which is pretty low. You know, we usually like to burn in the 20s uh for prescribed fire. It wasn't very hot at 65. And so um looks like the wind gust for forecast today to be um 21 miles an hour.

[00:07:38]So, for tomorrow, the bad news is just that it's we're going into kind of a pretty dry period. Uh 19, anything below 20% is pretty humid. Sorry. Anything under 20% is pretty dry from a fire behavior standpoint. You get down to 11, that's super dry, and fire really reacts accordingly, especially with wind. So you see that all through the week here we've got kind of these red colors in our forecast for relative humidity, minimum humidity, just meaning fire hazard is high due to that. Temperatures during the day aren't um that high and overnight the temperatures like tonight temperatures going to be um you know between 43 and 50. So nice overnight temperature drop but um in the humidity overnight will come up to about 50%. So under those conditions, fires usually lay down. That's why we make good progress fighting fires at night. So forecast could be worse. As far as a threat to bend, um no real threat to bend. You see that the the wind forecast is continued to be kind of out of the west or northwest. And that continues um you see these arrows here are showing you direction of wind. So you know, we don't usually get east winds much this time of uh this time of year in eastern Oregon. So, and if we look at the fire history here, there's just not real history of like fires blowing hard from the east to towards the west here. You see a lot of fires in in this country tend to start and burn to the east with a strong west wind.

[00:09:13]So, looking at the forecast from Pendleton, um they're saying that there's a short wave of um there's kind of a front that's moving in from the west and you can see that here. Got California down here, Oregon. Got a big high pressure sitting over Northern California right now. It's 85 degrees today where I live in Chico. And uh so you get the circulation around a high pressure system is clockwise. So, you can see that the weather's kind of moving in from around this low and coming into Oregon, kind of wrapping around coming down from the northwest. And so, as that front passes tomorrow, um it'll bring squirrelier winds, no moisture, and so they're not out of the woods on winds.

[00:10:01]But I think on fuels when we're looking at where the fire ran today, as I said, the fire ran out into or has is running into this area that burned last year. So, not a lot of fuels to worry about. U don't expect this fire is going to burn for days and days. And also that they'll probably it'll probably back down into the the burn units here and it'll probably be a done deal.

[00:10:24]So, that's in a nutshell what we think is going on from very limited intel. We'll have better intel. You know, a lot of our broadcasts happen in California.

[00:10:33]California's got a fleet of infrared mapping planes that they spend tens of millions a year on keeping in the air.

[00:10:42]And so we get we're spoiled here. We get like a ton of intel. We got a lot more cameras. And so rest of the world that's not spending California levels of money on wildfire still relying on heat satellites. And uh sometimes they'll have some infrared on bigger fires.

[00:11:00]Oregon's got a lot going on with fire history. I was just kind of working on a fire history layer uh of the whole West Coast just to because I don't usually look at the fire history in Oregon. And so if you like the stuff, if you're interested, tune in. Um and every time there's a big fire, we're going to be talking about this stuff. Other than that, I want to show you our website.

[00:11:21]Look out. Uh got some good new stuff on there. We got some videos about air tankers with uh Juan Brown of the Blanco channel. You can check out um we're building a fire engine here. I'm a prescribed burn boss and we'll talk more about losing prescribed burns. Um right now I don't have enough info to really uh talk much about it, but we're not going to shy away from that. But anyway, we got some uh we've also been doing some stuff on the geography of Iran in the Middle East just because I'm a geographer and think that stuff's interesting. But yeah, check out our site. We got all kinds of the theme here is mapbased storytelling and uh that's what we do. We got some sponsors here.

[00:12:00]Check them out. Click on their links.

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[00:12:07]Good to see all you regulars. I'm uh kind of packing up. I'm going to go do some uh some teaching here. So, been kind of running around doing all kinds of different stuff, but we're still feeding the channel. So check it out. Thanks for your support.

[00:12:24]And if you just joined us, go back and watch the video from the beginning. U we're talking about this fire blowing up in Oregon that's uh caused by prescribed burn. Thanks everyone. See you later.