2020 wildfire season: July 29th

It is getting towards the end of July and I expect that many of you know that there is a lot of wildfire activity in the western portion of the United States. Many of you follow Bill Gabbert of Wildfire Today, where he reports on a variety of current news affecting the wildfire community including reporting on many of the wildfires burning in the United States. For example two of the many recent wildfires he has reported on are the Caldwell Fire that has burned at least  67,789 acres and the Gold Fire, burning at least 21,000 acres  )

Another good source of current wildfire news is Mike Archer’s Wildfire News of the Day (WNOTD), a summary with links to current news and other articles of interest to the wildfire community including but not limited to current wildfires. Mike sends out his WNOTD emails to his subscribers Monday through Friday. Mike posted articles about the Caldwell and Gold Fires in the WNOTD I received on July 28th:

Caldwell Fire from kdrv, Mike's link expired but a quick search found a newer article: 

Gold Fire from ktvn

Large air tankers are working out west. As I write this there are a total of 28 large air tankers including two C-130 MAFF’s from the Air National Guard, the largest number of active  large air tankers in many years.  (see Bill Gabbert’s July 22nd article on Fire Aviation about the MAFFs activation. Bill has posted several articles on Fire Aviation in July 2020 showing some great photography of air tankers in action. 

I have often found good fire photography on incident pages on Inciweb, taken by firefighters working the fire, see for example Blue River 2 (28,051, last updated July10th) and Bringham Fire (23,142) acres, last updated on July 20th ), both wildfires are in Arizona. 

When I am following wildfires in my area or elsewhere I check my wildfire related bookmarks and may search the internet for more information on a given wildfire, often for my own curiosity and not for this blog. I may do so even when the wildfire is covered by some of the sources that I have already mentioned. Too numerous to list and specific sites will vary depending on the location of the wildfire: local media, state fire agencies, federal and state lands, private Facebook and Instagram groups, etc. Some of those sites will have good fire photography.