Utah warns fire season has already started amid drought and low snowpack

Fire season in Utah is no longer waiting for midsummer. Gov. Spencer Cox said the state is already in it, and the warning landed on top of a spring that has been starved of moisture, stripped of snowpack and primed for fast-moving human-caused starts.

The numbers are rough enough to change trip planning now. By the end of April, Utah had logged 117 fires, and about 85% of them were caused by people, including the Goshen Canyon Fire, which burned 408 acres in Utah County. State fire-prevention messaging has stressed that roughly 70% of wildfires in Utah can be prevented through simple mistakes that still happen every weekend: a campfire left warm, a trailer chain dragging sparks, a truck parked in dry grass.

The dryness is the bigger problem underneath all of it. Utah Drought reported that the state’s April 1 snowpack measured just 2.7 inches of snow water equivalent, the lowest April 1 reading on record going back to 1930. Most of Utah’s 140 SNOTEL sites were already at record-low snow water equivalent, and 53 were snow-free by April 1. Peak runoff had already come and gone by May 1 because of the low snowpack and record heat, which means the usual spring reset never really arrived.

That matters far beyond the ski hills and high basins. The National Interagency Coordination Center projected above-normal fire conditions across southwest Utah and northwest Arizona in May, with the risk spreading across most of Utah by June and all of the state by July. For Four Corners travelers, that translates into earlier campfire restrictions, more fragile dispersed-camping zones, trail and road closures on forest routes, and smoke that can turn a clean-looking itinerary into a last-minute reroute across canyon country and the high country alike.

Joel Ferry, director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, said the state may be headed toward one of the worst droughts in recorded history and called it “uncharted territory.” That is not just a water warning. Utah’s reservoir storage was averaging 72% full in early May, down from 82% a year earlier, statewide streamflow runoff was expected to run near 50% of normal, and natural inflows from the Colorado River into Lake Powell were forecast at 40% of normal. The usual margin for error is shrinking fast.

The one variable still hanging over the season is El Niño. Forecasters are watching whether conditions later in the summer could change how bad things get, but there is no guarantee of relief. For now, Utah officials are treating this as a fire year, not just a fire season, and that means the next few weeks may decide how many places stay open, how long restrictions last and how hard the whole Four Corners region gets hit.