Grand Canyon fire adds to 7.5 million acres of burned national parkland, analysis shows

USA Today

3 days ago

In four decades, fires that burned at least partly inside U.S. national parks blazed across more than 7.5 million acres of land, a new USA TODAY analysis of federal data reveals. The 683 fires recorded from 1984 to 2024 impacted 43 national parks, more than two-thirds of the nation's parks.
Just this week, fires in the Black Canyon of Gunnison National Park and Grand Canyon National Park are burning thousands of acres with low containment.
The Dragon Bravo fire, sparked by a lightning strike July 4, has already burned roughly 100 structures and become the largest fire, by far, to hit the Grand Canyon National Park since 1984. On July 13, the wildfire razed the historic 1937 Grand Canyon Lodge.
As of July 31, the Dragon Bravo Fire is now at 94,228 acres and is 9% contained. The South Rim fire in Colorado at Gunnison National Park was spread across 4,232 acres with 41% containment.
Which national parks have suffered the most fire damage?
In total, the national park fires reviewed by USA TODAY have burned 7.5 million acres, or more than 500 times the size of Manhattan.
The largest blaze, the Dixie fire in 2021, burned nearly 1 million acres in Northern California, including 73,240 acres within Lassen Volcanic National Park − roughly two-thirds of the park's total land area. Other notable fires are the North Fork and Clover Mist blazes that tore through Yellowstone National Park in 1988.
After decades of fire suppression, Yellowstone managers started to experiment in 1972 by letting lightning-caused fires burn. Then fires in summer 1988 charred more than one-third of the park and were fully controlled only when rain and snow fell months later.
That led the federal government to review its national policy on fire management. A landmark report reaffirmed the importance of natural fires but recommended improvements. The National Park Service rewrote its fire management guidelines to require contingency plans, monitoring procedures and stricter decision-making protocols before allowing fires to burn.
Among all fires − not just the ones affecting national parks − there has been a statistically significant increase in the number of fires and the acres burned each year. From 2020 to 2024, the number of annual fires has increased 68% compared with the 1990s, the first complete decade recorded in the fire data. The annual acres burned has more than doubled in the same time period.
1988 remains the year with the most fires and acreage burned intersecting national parks, the USA TODAY analysis found.
The title for the park with the most fires from the past four decades goes to the Everglades National Park in Florida, with nearly double the number of Grand Canyon fires.
Beyond beloved parks, climate change is fueling wildfire conditions. It's also making them deadlier and costlier.
Methodology of the fire analysis
USA TODAY reporters analyzed data recorded by MTSB (Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity), a multi-agency program that maps large fire perimeters and burn severity across all lands in the United States. The data, compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, tracks fires of 1,000 acres or more in the western United States and 500 acres or greater in the eastern states. The data also includes Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Fire boundaries from 1984 through 2024 were merged with National Park Service maps to look for instances in which fires overlapped − even partially − park boundaries. Fires that burned within park boundaries also burned beyond them in many instances.
SOURCES U.S. Geological Survey; U.S. Department of Agriculture