Origins of The Fires
The Yacolt Burn (also known as the Yacolt Fire, the Yacolt Blaze, the Yocalt-Cispus Burn, or the Columbia Fire of 1902) was the result of many weather factors as well as careless humans. The summer of 1902 has been drier than normal and early September winds blowing from west to east. A build-up of slash from loggers had not been burned off properly in the preceding two summers. On September 8 a fire was started by boys trying to burn a nest of yellow jackets near Eagle Creek, Oregon. Other large fires the occurred independently or combined with other fires started soon thereafter, including one started by a locomotive in Dodson, Oregon. Other accounts cite lightning as the genesis of the fire as well as careless campers and berry pickers, hunters, and loggers cutting slash. The fire spread rapidly, extending from Bridal Veil, Oregon to Cascade Locks, Oregon before burning debris carried across the Columbia River to Washington. It traveled 30 miles (48 km) in 36 hours and destroyed 238,920 acres (967 km²) of timber, about 12 billion board feet (28,000,000 m³), in Clark, Cowlitz and Skamania counties.
Read more about this topic: Yacolt Burn
Famous quotes containing the words origins of, origins and/or fires:
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me”
—William Stanley Merwin (b. 1927)