In the last week of June, wildfires exploded and blazed across the interior of Alaska that led to the home evacuations of residents from Fairbanks, Healy and Tok. There were also road closures involved. Late last month, The Bear Creek Fire directly impacted the Parks Highway just north of Healy with active fire behavior and suppression operations occurring right next to the roadway, according to FaceBook posts from the Division of Forestry and Fire Protection. The Alaska Arctic and Climate newsletter reported that “a cool May and early June resulted in a slow start, but the 2025 wildfire season in northwest North America exploded the week of June 15…. On Sunday June 22 early morning wildfire area burn totals were 99,107 acres in Alaska and 26,000 acres in the Yukon Territory.”
Rick Thoman is an Alaska climate specialist affiliated with the University of Alaska Fairbanks International Arctic Research Center and the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness. He previously worked for the Alaska region of the National Weather Service for more than 30 years, including provision of fire weather support that the weather supplied in previous years. He explained in a talk with KBBI that this “involved writing fire weather forecasts, or spot forecasts and providing guidance to the forecasters at Alaska Interagency Coordination Center (AICC). AICC serves as the focal point for initial attack resource coordination, logistics support, and predictive services for all state and federal agencies involved in wildland fire management and suppression in Alaska.
Thoman says winds could blow smoke from the interior into parts of South Central Alaska, “Now get the smoke through the Alaska Range and into South Central from the interior. Typically, that doesn't result in, you know, really poor air quality, but it certainly could create that smoky haze if that if the winds aloft, say, five to 15,000 feet up, were to go sustained out of the north.”
Last month, Thoman reported in a climate briefing that statewide, there was a lack of warm weather in May. Prudhoe Bay experienced the first time May temperature did not get above freezing In general, Alaska had the lowest May high temp since 1971.
This is Thoman’s interpretation of how 2025 currently looks compared to other years, “It really depends how you frame it. So as of this morning, AICC estimates we burned 283 284,000 acres. Now, that is not very that's pretty close to what we would expect to be in the last days of June. The, on the other hand, the, you know, the nothing to everything that we went through, you know, a week ago, that is very unusual. And we have to, there's only a few years that are quite even, you know, kind of in the same ballpark for just, you know, nothing happening. And then all of a sudden, it ramps up in a hurry. 2004 was probably the closest analog to to the nothing, to everything.”
At a community meeting at the Tri-Valley school in Healy, Alaska meteorologist Michael Brown from Anchorage provided these remarks that reflect some of Thoman’s comments on the standard nature of interior Alaska summer climate: that in general the early summer fire conditions were fairly normal but interior Alaska was dry.
In Thoman’s conversation, he concluded by noting what budget cuts to National Weather Service include: “...the National Weather Service, Fairbanks Forecast Office is no longer staffed overnight. It hasn't been since for, I don't know, a month now, and this potentially impacts wildfire forecasts in this in that those forecasts go out early in the morning, so they go out shortly after the day shift arrives. So while those are mostly being pulled out of the weather models, they by definition, can't be getting the same scrutiny from forecasters that they would have, you know, 10 years ago or last year.”
Assistance to the interior fires was provided by Nenana, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su Valley, Anchorage and as far south as Girdwood. Zach Fleming, operation chief from the Alaska Incident team stated. “without all the help that we've gotten from the around the state, this would have been a very difficult fire to manage, but everyone's been stepping in and helping us out.”
A Red Flag Warning is still in effect for the Interior of Alaska due to continued hot, dry, and windy conditions. Firefighters are preparing for this event, reinforcing fire lines and securing areas around potential fire hazards. Further updates on the interior Alaska fires as well as flooding, in other cases, can be found at other audio and published media sites. One key site is Alaska Wildfire Information at akfireinfo.com.
