One More Bear Gulch Fire Update

It’s been raining today. And word on the street is that the Olympic Peninsula is going to receive up to 5 inches of rain this week. This is all very good new for the Bear Gulch Fire that started earlier this year, forced me to cancel the Beast of Big Creek race and has since grown to over 20,000 acres. It has been burning all summer long in very remote and steep terrain with no roads and no way to really fight it, but just let it burn and pray for rain. No structures were lost, which is some good news, but the story of ICE showing up and detaining firefighters on the scene laid a dark cloud over the whole thing, as if a fire in one of my beloved areas of the PNW wasn’t bad enough. Now that the rains are here we’re probably starting to see the end of the fire, but before we close this chapter too soon – trails won’t be open for weeks, if not month – I wanted to add one more note about what actually happened with one of the firefighters Trump’s Gestapo stupidly detained.

Isabella Breda writes for The Seattle Times, shared here on Fire Engineering:

“They stopped him without reasonable suspicion, arrested him without probable case, ignored the laws governing warrantless arrests,” his attorneys stated in court documents, “arrested him in the midst of a natural disaster despite his pending U Visa application, denied him calls to counsel, and detained him for two weeks without considering him for release or even indicating what law authorized his detention.”

What an incredible waste of government resources and an absolute inhumane and abhorrent thing to do.