Wildfire Season 2026
July 29 – August 16, 2026 Updated Aug 16
Every published chapter of The Fold's coverage of Wildfire Season 2026, in one place — oldest to newest, updated as the story develops.
The national wildfire scoreboard says this year is 130% of normal. In the Northwest it is missing more acres than it counts
The federal situation report’s year-to-date table credits the Northwest with 776,014 acres burned. Its own active-incident table, on the same page, puts the fires currently assigned there at 1,835,823 — a gap of more than a million acres, and the report footnotes why.
America’s two largest wildfires have cost less between them than one Colorado fire a third their size
A single query against the federal incident feed puts Aspen Acres at $97m on 101,961 acres. Rowe Creek Complex and Big Grass, 699,000 acres between them, come to $82m. What a fire costs turns out to have very little to do with how much of it burns.
The federal fire scoreboard says 6.35m acres. NIFC’s own forecasters put the season past 7m on 31 July
The daily situation report and the agency’s August outlook describe two different fire seasons. NIFC wrote the discrepancy down itself, ten days ago, and the two totals have still not met.
The federal fire scoreboard passed 7 million acres in a single overnight step. Ninety-seven per cent of it was one column catching up
The daily federal situation report’s year-to-date total jumped 653,852 acres between its 14 and 15 August editions — the largest one-day step of 2026. The Bureau of Land Management’s column supplied 636,749 of it, on a morning its own Northwest fires reported almost no growth.