BY KAREN BOSSICK

John and Diane Peavey were driving to town from their Flat Top Sheep Ranch Sunday when they spotted smoke rising above the sagebrush-covered hills.

Must be below Fish Creek, they decided.

Little did they know that a few hours later they would be fearing for their lives, their home and their livestock as the Sharps Fire rampaged across the their ranch east of Bellevue, exploding to 27,000 acres overnight.

“There are areas that look like a lunar landscape,” said Diane Peavey.

A Type I fire crew headed by Beth Lund, the incident commander for the 2013 Beaver Creek Fire made its way to the fire in Muldoon Canyon Monday evening after a 6 p.m. briefing in Shoshone. A Type 1 team is the highest level there is.

“That means this has been determined a high priority area,” said Dennie Smyer, a fire investigator for the Twin Falls District BLM. “We’re just trying to hold until they can arrive. They’ll be able to bring bigger helicopters, more aircraft and the best of the best hot shot crews.”

Fire investigators have determined that the fire was caused by someone shooting explosive targets six miles east of Bellevue. The fire was reported at 11:15 a.m. and had grown to 3,000 acres by Sunday evening, prompting the evacuations of the Little Wood River Reservoir and High 5 Creek recreation areas.

On Monday afternoon the Blaine County Sheriff ordered the immediate mandatory evacuation of residences on Little Wood Reservoir Road and Flat Top Road north of the Little Wood Reservoir.

Residents of Fish Creek Road were also alerted to gather their medications and pets and be ready to leave home at a moment’s notice as the fire marched toward the east.

Cabins and other structures are threatened, as is sage grouse habitat.

Firefighters put on “a pretty active air show” on Sunday, according to Bellevue resident Anne Jeffery, who often serves as a public information officer on wildfires.

They dumped 100,000 gallons of retardant and water with the help of an air tanker, a couple single engine air tankers (also known as SEATs), two helicopters that scooped water out of a nearby pond and super scoopers that flew just above the surface of Magic Reservoir, scooping up water into their bellies.

Come Monday morning the fire had shifted and was heading “northeast and a little bit west,” according to interim incident commander Clay Stephens.

Even with another 42,000 gallons of water and retardant firefighters were unable to corral the fire, which by Monday night was half the size of the 2007 Castle Rock Fire that torched 48,520 acres.

“The steep slopes make this unique to fight because we just can’t put our dozers and other equipment where we want,” said Smyer. “A lot of this is air show and people on the ground.”

Fire monitors who have picked vegetation around the area, baking it for 24 hours to determine the fuel level have determined the fuel moisture is “really low,” Smyer added.

“With temperatures in the low 90s and low humidity, all you need is a spark up there and it would take off eating up huge chunks of ground, because the fuel’s so dry,” he said, gesturing towards the hills above the EE-DA-HO Ranch in Muldoon Canyon. “One spark and it consumes the whole thing because there’s continuous fuel, no natural breaks.”

The dirt road through Muldoon Canyon boasted a steady stream of traffic Monday morning as trucks ferried helicopter jet fuel, porta potties and other supplies to EE-DA-HO Ranch where workers were building a mini-city to house the incoming firefighters.

Helicopters emerged from thick smoke to collect water from the pond on the ranch, taking it back to the fire by flying up Martin Canyon, which was torched by an explosive target in July 2017.

One man drove out the canyon and walked up to Stephens as he arranged for a camp crew.

“I have some property out there north of the Oneida cabin,” he said. “Is it all black?”

“The fire hasn’t gotten to his cabin—it was roughly two miles from the cabin last night,” Stephens replied.

“Do you think you’ll be able to stop it?” the man asked.

“It depends on what the wind does. It did the hell what it wanted to yesterday,” replied Stephens, who had just gotten off the 90,000-acre Bruneau Fire in southern Idaho. “It was Western, really wild.”

He turned to a truck load of firefighters coming in. “We’ve got plenty of work for you.”

John and Diane Peavey pulled up in their dusty black pickup, enroute to a conference in Ketchum.

“I heard it was a campfire—that someone didn’t get their campfire out,” John said, addressing Smyer.

“They’ve determined it was explosive target,” Smyer replied. “They’re prohibited on public lands but people do them, anyway.”

“Any rain?”

“Not that I see for 10 days.”

While John took a phone call, Diane recounted how they had been told they’d better take care of their thousand head of cattle and 4,000 mother sheep as they returned to the ranch Sunday afternoon

They got at least 200 out of the High 5 Creek campground and took them to green bottomlands that were ringed by black. They took one band of sheep to the backwash of the Little Wood River Reservoir and another to some lush green meadows.

They were at the corrals at the end of Cove Spring when they saw fire rushing toward them.

“I thought, ‘This is it. There’s no escape. We’re going to die,’” recounted Diane.  “There were flames on both sides of the road at one point and there was nothing to stop it. I realized we could be surrounded. ”

At one point, Diane said, it looked as if the fire would take the ranch. They ended up spending the night at the ranch, watching as fire wrapped around the contours of the landscape.

“Last night we had flames on both sides of the road that were seven, eight feet tall,” said John.“It was  spectacular with the fire hitting a tree and the flames shooting 30, 40 feet high.”

Firefighters were kept away from the fire until the winds died down in the evening.

“One of our grandsons is a BLM firefighter. I don’t know if he’s on this one or not,” said John.

Come Monday there were little fires all over the land, said Diane.

On the advice of firefighters, the Peavey family was up at 5 a.m., tending to livestock and other matters on the advice of firefighters who told them: “Whatever you do, do between 5 and 9 before the wind comes up.”

“For 35 years I’ve been hauling hoses all over the yard and I finally decided it was time to put irrigation in, then I couldn’t get it to work,” Diane recounted. “I called the guy to see why it wasn’t coming on and he said, ‘How close is the fire? I can be there in an hour!’”

She flipped through pictures on her phone of John standing in a wooded area that resembled charred toothpicks and a moon with an orange halo around it.

“I’m walking around wearing a backpack with all my writings on a computer,” she said.

The Peaveys are not stranger to wildland fires. There have been fires on the desert range south of Carey. And there have been at least two fires on the Flat Top Sheep Ranch in the past few years. Or, what John  calls Flat Top 1 and Flat Top 2.

“Our ranch has 23,000 deeded acres with a mix of public land. It’s open to the public for hunting and camping, but we may have to rethink that,” John sighed.

SMOKE COULD BE A PROBLEM

While the air was clear in Ketchum Monday morning, smoke was noticeable from the Heatherlands south. It had cleared out by 1 p.m. but the Department of Environmental Quality advised that the air quality was unhealthy for sensitive individuals.

Right now there are no fire restrictions in the area because conditions haven’t yet the criteria for restrictions. But they’re coming, said Smyer.