Utah faces particularly dangerous fire weather as Cottonwood Fire rages
Utah’s rare PDS Red Flag Warning covered the Cottonwood Fire, with 30 hours of critical fire weather and a road closure near Beaver.
The Cottonwood Fire near Beaver was active Friday as the National Weather Service in Salt Lake City issued a PDS Red Flag Warning for parts of southwest, central and southern Utah.
The warning ran from 9 a.m. to midnight and named Marysvale and Junction in Piute County, Panguitch in Garfield County, Beaver and Milford in Beaver County, Cedar City and Enoch in Iron County, and Enterprise and Pine Valley in Washington County. Extreme fire weather conditions were expected through late Friday evening across central and southern mountains and southwest Utah, with widespread critical fire weather continuing through Saturday across nearly the entire state. In some parts of southern and southeastern Utah, conditions were expected to stay critical for more than 30 continuous hours.
The Cottonwood Fire began Monday, June 22, near Cottonwood Campground on the Beaver Ranger District in Fishlake National Forest, and it remained active as the red-flag warning took effect. Fishlake National Forest closed SR-153 in both directions between mileposts 2 and 25, and the forest’s Cottonwood Fire Closure Order took effect June 24 at 12:01 a.m. and will remain in place through Dec. 31 unless it is rescinded.
Beaver County officials were being flooded with hundreds of property-status inquiries but could not yet provide individual damage assessments because the fire remained too active to safely send deputies into the canyon. The county said field personnel were focused on life safety, evacuations and support for wildland fire crews, and asked property owners to submit information as if they had lost property so officials could build a damage-assessment database once the area was safe to enter.
In a June 11 drought update, Utah’s Division of Water Resources said the state’s deepening drought had accelerated the drying of soils and vegetation, and that wildfire season had already produced more than 230 fires in 2026, most of them human-caused. Utah’s wildfire response is split among federal, state, tribal, county and local agencies, with federal crews handling fires on federal and tribal lands and the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire & State Lands coordinating incidents on state and private land outside city limits.
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