When lightning sparked a small fire amid the stately ponderosa pines on the remote North Rim of the Grand Canyon last month, national parks officials treated it like a good thing.
Instead of racing to put the fire out immediately, as was the practice for decades, they deferred to the doctrines of modern fire science. The prevailing wisdom says the American West was forged by flames that nourish the soil and naturally reduce the supply of dry fuels.
So officials built containment lines to keep the fire away from people and the park’s historic buildings and then stepped back to let the flames perform their ancient magic.
That strategy worked well — until it didn't. A week later, the wind suddenly increased and the modest, 120-acre controlled burn exploded into a “megafire,” the largest in the United States so far this year. As of Saturday, the blaze had burned more than 145,000 acres and was 63% contained.
“The fire jumped our lines on Friday, July 11,” said a still shaken parks employee who was on the front line that day and asked not to be named for fear of official retaliation. “By 3 in the afternoon, crews were struggling to hold it,” the employee said through a hacking cough, attributing it to smoke inhaled that chaotic day.
“By 9 p.m., there was nothing we could do. Embers were raining down everywhere and everything that could burn was burning,” the employee added.
Whether the Dragon Bravo fire’s escape from confinement was due to a colossal mistake, incredibly bad luck, or some tragic combination of the two, will be the focus of multiple investigations.
But the fact that it happened at all, and especially in such a public place — on the rim of one of the world’s most popular tourist attractions, with seemingly the whole planet watching — is already a nightmare for a generation of biologists, ecologists, climate scientists and progressive wildland firefighters who have spent years trying to sell a wary public on the notion of “good fire.”
Stephen Pyne, a prolific author and renowned environmental historian at Arizona State University, summed up their collective anxiety, saying, “I hope one very bad fire won’t be used to destroy a good policy.”
But the magnitude of the setback for good-fire advocates — especially at a time when federal officials seem actively hostile toward any ideas they view as tree-hugging environmentalism — is hard to overstate.
On July 10, the day before the wind changed, the fire had been burning sleepily for a week without any apparent cause for alarm. The park service confidently posted on social media that it was “no threat to public safety or the developed area” of the North Rim and that the "fire continues to be managed under a confine and contain strategy, which allows for the natural role of fire on the landscape."
Less than 48 hours later, some 70 buildings, including guest cabins, park administrative offices and employee housing units, had been reduced to ash.
One was the Grand Canyon Lodge, originally designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood with a Spanish-style exterior. It was completed in 1928, and then burned down four years later. So Underwood redesigned the structure, creating a more rustic lodge out of the original stonework, perched on the very edge of the canyon. Admirers claimed it had one of the most serene and awe-inspiring views in the world.
By July 12, it was a smoldering ruin.
In the days that followed, tourists on the South Rim of the canyon, and social media viewers around the globe, watched in awe as the fire grew so big and hot it created its own weather, sending pyrocumulus clouds billowing hundreds of feet into the air and dense smoke streaming down into the idyllic canyon below.
As the spectacle raged, and word spread that officials had initially let the small fire burn for the good of the environment, Arizona’s top politicians demanded explanations.
Both of the state’s Democratic senators called for investigations, and Gov. Katie Hobbs, also a Democrat, took to X to demand “intense oversight and scrutiny” of the federal government’s decision “to manage that fire as a controlled burn during the driest, hottest part of the Arizona summer.”
The people of Arizona “deserve answers for how this fire was allowed to decimate the Grand Canyon National Park,” Hobbs added.
Those tough questions are predictable and fair, said Len Nielson, the staff chief in charge of prescribed burns and environmental protection for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. He hopes investigators will be able to identify a specific failure — such as a bad weather forecast — and take concrete steps to prevent the next disaster.
“But I hope we don’t overreact,” he said, and turn away from the notion of good fire. “Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
The logic behind intentionally igniting fires on wild land, or simply containing natural fires without attempting to extinguish them, is based on the the fact that fires have long been part of the West's landscape, and are deemed essential for its ecological health.
Before European settlers arrived in the American West and started suppressing fire at every turn, forests and grasslands burned on a regular basis. Sometimes lightning ignited the flames; sometimes it was Indigenous people using fire as an obvious, and remarkably effective, tool to clear unwanted vegetation from their fields and create better sight lines for hunting. Whatever the cause, it was common for much of the land, including vast tracts in California, to burn about once a decade.
That kept the fuel load in check and, in turn, kept fires relatively calm.
But persuading private landowners and public officials that it’s a good thing to deliberately start fires in their backyards is a constant battle, Nielson said. Even when things go right — which is 99% of the time, he said — smoke can drift into an elementary school or an assisted living facility, testing the patience of local residents.
It took three years to get the necessary permits from air quality regulators and other local authorities for a modest, 50-acre prescribed burn in Mendocino County early this year. The goal was to clear brush from the roads leading out of a University of California research facility so they could be used as emergency exits in the event of an actual wildfire. The main obstacle? Nearby vineyard owners worried the burn would make their world-class grapes too smoky for discerning wine lovers.
So the amount of damage control and cajoling it will take to keep things on track after the disaster in Arizona is enough to make a good fire advocate’s head spin.
“It’s always a roll of the dice,” Nielson acknowledged with a sigh. Wind, in particular, is hard to predict, and getting harder with federal cuts to the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“If they weren’t getting accurate weather predictions in Arizona, that would be a really big deal,” Nielson said.
Riva Duncan, a retired fire chief for the U.S. Forest Service and vice president of the nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, also pointed to federal cuts as a possible contributing factor, specifically the job cuts at the forest and parks service orchestrated by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year.
Although actual firefighters were spared from the firings, and were not eligible for buyouts, crucial support people were let go, including meteorologists and people who specialize in predicting fire behavior.
“So we have fewer people running models, giving forecasts and telling firefighters on the ground what they can expect,” Duncan said.
A National Park Service spokesperson did not respond to questions about the weather forecast, but a review of National Weather Service data and fire weather forecasts issued by NOAA showed only light winds predicted before the flames jumped the containment lines.
Timothy Ingalsbee, another former Forest Service firefighter and the executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said the federal firefighting workforce has been shrinking for years due to an inability to recruit new employees for the remote, grueling work.
But losing so many experienced people this year created a huge and sudden “brain drain,” he said.
It hasn't helped that this part of Arizona has been struck by severe drought in recent years, with the period from July 2020 to June 2025 being the fifth-warmest and fourth-driest on record, according to the Arizona Department of Water Resources. In this harsh and remote landscape, the lack of rain has dried up both the desert chaparral and the ponderosa pines and other conifers that occupy the higher elevations of the Grand Canyon’s North Rim — creating a landscape that was primed to ignite.
For Ingalsbee, it seemed reasonable to him to let some of the land burn, especially the steep terrain inside the canyon. "That’s really, really gnarly ground. Why put your people at risk?”
But he was shocked by photos he saw of shrubs growing right up against the windows of the lodge, which is an invitation for disaster during a wildfire. “At some point that glass shatters with the heat and pulsing flame, and then you’ve got pandemonium.”
Pyne said it’s still too soon to say whether the federal workforce’s “downsizing and whimsical firings” had anything to do with the Dragon Bravo’s fire’s disastrous escape. But he can’t help wondering why the people in charge didn’t see it coming.
The Southwest depends on late summer monsoons to replenish moisture in trees and plants, making them less likely to burn. Every large fire in the region, he said, occurs in the hot, dry period leading up to those monsoon rains.
The Hermit’s Peak fire in New Mexico in 2022, which started with a controlled burn that got out of control and exploded to more than 300,000 acres, becoming Exhibit A for what can go wrong, began in the lead-up to the monsoon, Pyne said. So did several lesser-known fires that escaped in the Grand Canyon over the years, he said.
And the monsoon was already behind schedule this year when officials decided to let the Dragon Bravo fire burn.
“Maybe they knew something I don’t,” Pyne said, “but my sense is that the odds were really against them.”
Pyne, who spent 15 years on a fire crew in the Grand Canyon, has a personal interest in the outcome of the pending Dragon Bravo investigations. Though he doesn’t want a bad fire to destroy a good policy, he said, he also doesn’t want officials to claim they were following a good policy to justify bad decisions.
“Was letting this fire burn within the range of acceptable risks?” Pyne asked. “That seems like a very legitimate line of inquiry.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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