Two Idaho fires rage as summer heat wears on

Tamara Kemsley in Nature World News: Forest fires are once again blazing in the hot, dry West. Only this time, instead of Colorado or Arizona, it's Idaho that's feeling the heat after two fires started over the weekend continue to burn.

One, called the Lodgepole fire, is located roughly 15 miles west of the town Challisa and was discovered around noon on Saturday, at which point local fire resources responded both quickly and effectively, according to NASA. As of Monday, the cause of the fire remained unknown and firefighters continued to work suppressing the flames that had burned some 650 acres.

No injuries have been linked to the fire, though a local campground was forced to shut down because of it.

Making matters difficult for the firefighters was the discovery of a second fire, called the Bradley fire, nearby and just a handful of hours after the Lodgepole fire was first uncovered, forcing firefighters to reallocate resources.

"We had an aggressive initial attack," Paul Sever of the Central Idaho Fire Center told the Associated Press about the Lodgepole fire. "But we moved stuff from there when the Bradley fire broke out."

For this reason, a DC-10 jet fire retardant bomber is currently on loan from Southern California and has made, according to Sever, several successfully drops....

Generic wildfire photo from the US Bureau of Land Management