A new wildfire near Circle was attacked by smokejumpers and water scooping aircraft Tuesday. The Alaska Fire Service reports that the Birch Creek Fire is burning 17 miles northwest of Circle, in the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
An AFS post says the roughly 10-acre lightning-started blaze is within a mile of a full protection area, and a couple miles from a Native land allotment.
Meanwhile, the AFS reports that firefighters have finished work on two other lightning-caused fires in the refuge and that a crew is demobilizing from the 55 hundred acre Sheenjek River Fire, north of Fort Yukon.
Only a 176,000 acres have burned in Alaska this season, the result of cool wet weather in much of the state, but the AFS cautions that northern Alaska, specifically the Yukon Flats and Kobuk River Valley remain dry.
