Utah declared a state of emergency and restricted fireworks through July 5 on Friday as the Cottonwood Fire surged past 112 square miles in southern Utah and remained 0% contained. Strong winds kept air support grounded, leaving crews to fight the blaze on the ground while it continued to spread unchecked.
The move came as Utah headed into July Fourth with fire danger already rising fast. The Cottonwood Fire, which started Monday in a sparsely populated part of southern Utah, had burned nearly 72,000 acres by Friday evening, and mandatory evacuations had already been ordered in some areas. Officials also put roughly 1,300 residents in Marysvale, Junction and Circleville on notice that they should be ready to leave if conditions worsened.
Friday was the day the scale of the fire and the scale of the response finally matched. Utah had 10 active wildfires burning across more than 144,700 acres, and the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City issued a rare Particularly Dangerous Situation warning for five Utah counties, the first such alert in that office's history. A red flag warning covered most of Utah, underscoring how dry, windy conditions were making the western landscape unusually volatile at the start of the holiday period.
Smoke from the Cottonwood Fire could be seen for hundreds of miles, all the way to Colorado, even as air quality at Zion and Bryce Canyon was not significantly affected beyond some haze in the Bryce area. The fire also severely damaged the Eagle Point ski resort in Beaver County, and residents near the burn scar were already reckoning with what was lost. Bruce Brown said he went out with the sheriff on Thursday and found that his cabin and others in the area were gone.
Alyssa Olsen said her family's cabin burned too, and that the structure had been the last place her family gathered for photos with her grandmother before she died of cancer. “That stuff you can't just build back,” she said. The fire's path left little room for optimism: if the winds keep whipping and aircraft stay on the ground, the question is not whether the Cottonwood Fire matters, but how much more of Utah it can take before crews regain the upper hand.
