Taylor Complex—Tok, Alaska

During normal summers, the wildland fire season in the lightning-caused, fire-dominated boreal forest ecosystem of interior Alaska begins slowly in May, peaks in June, and tapers off in July, ending with the late summer rains of August. However, 2004 was not a normal summer. Fires started strong in May, were constant through June, and by the middle of July, the exhausted Alaska fire crews started hitting regulatory continuous deployment limits for time spent on the fire line. This invoked an emergency call for wildland fire crews and resource specialists from all parts of the United States.

This map shows the fire history or fire progression of the region of Alaska that is north of the Alaska Range and just west of the Alaska/Canada border from June 24 to July 24.

A fire progression map is a tool used by wildland fire incident commanders during pass-off briefings when a new incident commander takes control every two weeks. Forest scientists also use the maps in postfire forest rehabilitation work. When this map was made in the third week of July, fires had burned more than 865,430 acres (350,228 hectares); it was expected that the late summer rains of August were near, but they never arrived.

The Taylor Complex fires finally were extinguished by snow in late September after burning 1,305,252 acres (528,218 hectares). Across Alaska in 2004, 6.75 million acres (2.73 million hectares) were burned in wildland fires—by far the worst fire season since record keeping started in the 1950s.