Zero Percent Containment, a Ski Resort in Ashes: The Full Story of Utah's Cottonwood Fire and the State's Worst Fire Season in Years

A Fire That Tripled, Then Tripled Again

The Cottonwood Fire began at approximately 3:36 p.m. on Monday, 22 June 2026, igniting near milepost 5 on State Route 153 in Beaver County, Utah, close to the mouth of Beaver Canyon. What has happened in the roughly 48 hours since then is one of the more dramatic single-fire growth trajectories Utah has documented this year. By 10:45 p.m. that same night, the fire had already reached 10,000 acres. By Tuesday night, it had tripled again, crossing 31,000 acres. By Wednesday morning, 24 June, fire officials placed it at an estimated 59,613 acres — effectively doubling overnight — with containment standing at zero percent throughout the entire period. Driving that explosive growth, according to the US Forest Service, was a combination of high temperatures, gusty winds reaching up to 50 mph, and what officials described simply as "extremely dry fuels."

Fire officials confirmed on Tuesday that they suspect the Cottonwood Fire is human-caused, though they have released no further details about the specific circumstances surrounding its origin, according to Salt Lake City ABC affiliate KTVX. The blaze has since surpassed the previously larger Iron Fire, burning roughly 28 miles southwest of Provo in Juab County near Eureka, to become the largest single active wildfire currently burning in Utah.

The Resort That Has Operated as a Ski Destination Since the 1970s

Among the most significant and emotionally resonant developments in the fire's path has been its direct impact on Eagle Point Resort, a ski destination in the Tushar Mountains that has operated continuously since the 1970s. The resort maintains two base areas — Canyonside on the lower mountain and a separate upper mountain section. Reporting from SnowBrains, an outlet specifically focused on snowsports industry coverage, confirmed that the resort's lower lodge at Canyonside has been destroyed by the fire. The status of the upper mountain base area remains unknown, because the same mandatory evacuation orders that forced residents from the area have also prevented any official assessment of conditions there.

The loss represents one of the more concrete and visually documented instances of structural destruction tied to this fire, distinct from the broader uncertainty surrounding cabin and residential property losses that remain under assessment elsewhere in the burn area.

Who Has Been Forced Out

Mandatory Level 3 "Go" evacuation orders — the most urgent category in the standardised wildfire evacuation alert system, meaning residents must leave immediately with no opportunity to gather belongings or prepare property — have remained continuously in effect since Monday night for four specific communities: HiLo Estates, east of Beaver City; Merchant Valley; Eagle Point Resort itself; and the Arrowhead Summer Homes. Beaver County Emergency Management's alert, issued through the National Weather Service at 9:18 p.m. on the night the fire began, was characteristically blunt: "EVACUATE EAGLE POINT AND MERCHANT VALLEY NOW."

Evacuating residents have been specifically instructed that they cannot use State Route 153 to leave the area, since that highway has been entirely shut down in both directions between mileposts 2 and 25. Instead, anyone evacuating from the mountain has been directed to travel east into neighbouring Piute County, with onward instructions to continue toward the town of Junction. As the fire's footprint expanded through the week, additional communities — including those across Piute County — were placed on heightened alert and told to be ready for evacuation at short notice, with one specific advisory ordering Piute County residents to be prepared to evacuate by 2 a.m. on a date during the fire's most active growth period. As of the most recent updates, formal evacuation orders had not been extended to Piute County itself, though residents there have been strongly urged to register for the Everbridge mass emergency alert system and to monitor official notifications closely given the fire's proximity and continued growth.

"It's Devastating": The Human Cost Behind the Acreage Figures

Behind the official acreage and containment statistics that dominate the institutional reporting on this fire sits the considerably more immediate experience of the people whose homes, cabins and seasonal properties sit within its path. Beaver resident David Long offered one of the more direct on-the-ground assessments captured by local media: "This is probably the worst I've seen since I've been down here." The Beaver County Sheriff's Office confirmed on Tuesday that the full extent of the fire's damage to cabins and private property in the affected area remained unclear at that point — an acknowledgment that, given the continued zero-percent containment status and the fire's sustained extreme behaviour through the following day, suggests a genuine damage assessment may not be possible for some time yet.

The Sheriff's Office has set up a practical mechanism for residents who were evacuated and left property behind: an online witness statement form, available through the Beaver County Sheriff's website under its Records tab, asking residents to provide details including a current contact phone number or email address. The Sheriff's Office was careful to clarify that submitting this information does not in itself confirm any damage to a specific property, but rather allows officials to "identify potentially affected locations and owners" so that, as damage assessments eventually become feasible, the department can communicate with affected property owners more efficiently.

The Firefighting Response and What Crews Are Doing Right Now

Command of the Cottonwood Fire transferred to the Great Basin Complex Incident Management Team 5 at 6 a.m., a multi-state coordinated command structure typically activated for fires of this scale and complexity. The team's current operational priorities, as described in official updates, centre on structure protection and the construction of fire containment lines wherever conditions allow safe access. On the fire's east side, crews are focused specifically on protecting structures while simultaneously building containment line. On the west side, firefighters have been working around the back side of the fire to establish a fire line that can serve as an anchor point for extending a continuous containment perimeter. Overnight operations on the City Creek area specifically involved both bulldozers and hand crews working to establish fire line under cover of darkness, with the broader operation now running both day and night shifts to maintain 24-hour fire coverage.

The full scale of resources deployed against the fire includes multiple Hotshot crews — the most highly trained and physically demanding category of wildland firefighting personnel in the US system — alongside dedicated structural protection teams, heavy equipment operators, helicopters and fixed-wing air tankers, all working simultaneously to protect structures, reduce hazardous fuel loads ahead of the fire's advance, and establish containment lines wherever weather and terrain conditions permit. Rocky Mountain Power has proactively de-energised power lines throughout the affected area — both in Beaver County and separately across neighbouring Piute County — as a deliberate wildfire safety measure, warning residents to prepare for what could be a prolonged power outage as a direct consequence. Separate crews from Rocky Mountain Power have also been working specifically to clear downed power lines along Highway 153 and to clear brush around power infrastructure ahead of the fire's path on its eastern flank.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved federal funding specifically to help cover the cost of the firefighting operation, with FEMA noting in its approval that, at the time of the funding request, the Cottonwood Fire was threatening more than 300 homes along with critical utility and infrastructure assets in the area.

Six Other Major Fires Burning Across Utah Right Now

The Cottonwood Fire, despite its severity and rapid growth, is only one of an unusually large number of significant wildfires currently active across Utah — itself a reflection of how severe the state's broader 2026 fire season has become. According to Utah Fire Info, the Cottonwood Fire is one of 349 wildfires currently burning across the state, collectively consuming more than 200 square miles of Utah land.

Among the other major active fires, the Iron Fire — burning near Eureka in Juab County, roughly 28 miles southwest of Provo — has grown to 37,172 acres after making an aggressive run eastward through the Pinyon Canyon area, though firefighters have managed to stop that specific run and have achieved 17 percent containment, a meaningfully more advanced suppression status than the Cottonwood Fire's continued zero percent. More than 600 people were evacuated from the Eureka area at the height of the Iron Fire's activity, with local reporting describing the emptied town as carrying "the feeling of a ghost town" in the fire's immediate aftermath. Fire officials managing the Iron Fire have specifically flagged concern about an approaching windstorm accompanied by dry lightning, warning that storms of this kind "often produce high outflow winds that can actively increase fire behavior and lead to aggressive growth and challenge containment features" — a forecast that threatens to undo recent containment progress on that fire specifically.

Utah Fire Info has organised a community meeting for residents in the Eureka area, held at the Apple Valley Elementary School gymnasium in Santaquin, specifically to provide direct, timely updates to a community that officials explicitly acknowledged is experiencing "a stressful and disruptive time." The agency has also issued specific public health guidance for nearby communities affected by smoke from both the Cottonwood and Iron fires, advising children, older adults, and anyone with existing heart or respiratory conditions to remain indoors where possible.

The Bigger Picture: Utah's Worst Fire Season in Years

What makes the Cottonwood and Iron fires particularly significant is not merely their individual scale but the broader statewide trajectory they represent. According to SnowBrains' reporting, more than 105,000 acres have burned across Utah cumulatively in 2026 — a figure that crossed the 100,000-acre threshold this week specifically because of the Cottonwood Fire's rapid growth. Just seven weeks earlier, Utah's cumulative burn total for the entire year stood at only 13,300 acres. The 2026 fire season has, in other words, consumed nearly eight times as much land in the past seven weeks as it had in the entire period before that — and the season has already burned through nearly two-thirds of the total acreage Utah lost across the whole of 2025, a year that was itself the state's worst fire year in five years.

Meteorologist Collin Gross, writing on social media as the Cottonwood Fire intensified, connected this acceleration directly to the underlying climate conditions driving it: "The concern following a record dry winter and above average temperatures in the Great Basin is coming a reality. Multiple intense wildfires are burning in Nevada and Utah, producing thick smoke plumes on visible satellite tonight." The National Weather Service had separately warned, in advance of the Cottonwood Fire's ignition, that the broader Beaver and Piute County region would see increasingly active and dangerous fire weather conditions developing statewide through the latter part of the week — a forecast that the fire's subsequent explosive growth has, so far, borne out in full.

NOAA's satellite monitoring systems, including the NOAA-20 satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument, have been actively tracking the Cottonwood Fire's smoke plumes as they billow eastward across the state — imagery that has been shared publicly to illustrate both the fire's active intensity and the scale of the smoke impact reaching communities well beyond the immediate evacuation zones.

What Residents Across Utah Should Be Doing Right Now

For residents in or near any of Utah's currently active fire zones, the practical guidance from emergency management officials remains consistent: register for the Everbridge mass alert system if you have not already done so, monitor the Beaver County Sheriff's Office and Piute County's official channels directly rather than relying on secondhand information, avoid all roads leading toward active fire areas to preserve clear access for emergency responders, and follow evacuation orders immediately and completely when issued rather than waiting to assess the situation personally. For those outside the immediate fire zones but within range of the smoke plumes now visible across much of southern and central Utah, air quality monitoring services including IQAir are recommending residents shut doors and windows, set HVAC systems to recirculate mode, use high-performance air purifiers where available, and wear KN95 or FFP2 masks if outdoor activity in smoke-affected areas becomes unavoidable.

With the Cottonwood Fire still at zero percent containment as of the most recent official updates, and with fire officials across the state simultaneously bracing for additional severe weather that could intensify the separately burning Iron Fire, Utah's 2026 fire season — already its most destructive in years by total acreage — shows no clear sign of having reached its peak.

Sources

1. ABC News — Wind-whipped Utah wildfire grows to nearly 60,000 acres, prompts evacuations (June 24, 2026) — abcnews.com
2. Fox 13 Now — Cottonwood Fire nears 60,000 acres in size; new communities on alert (June 24, 2026) — fox13now.com
3. SnowBrains — Human-Caused Cottonwood Fire Tears Through Utah's Eagle Point Resort, Scorching 60,000 Acres (June 24, 2026) — snowbrains.com
4. ABC4 Utah — Human-caused Cottonwood Fire burns an estimated 30,100 acres, 0% containment — abc4.com
5. ABC4 Utah — 'Leave the area immediately': Evacuations in place for Cottonwood Fire, at estimated 10,000 acres — abc4.com
6. Newsweek — Cottonwood Fire Satellite Images Show Scale of 31,000 Acre Utah Blaze (June 24, 2026) — newsweek.com
7. KUTV — Iron Fire expands to over 37,000 acres, reaches 17% containment (June 24, 2026) — kutv.com
8. IQAir — Wildfire Map Spotlight: Cottonwood Fire, Utah (June 24, 2026) — iqair.com