I was camping on 1000 lakes mountain last night, and this morning came down across 70 and up to fairview for lunch. We were surprised to see that the paper on the counter of the diner had fairview on the cover, and our server told us that the evacuation had just ended and they had only been open for about an hour. the helicopters were still running water over to the fire, but the immediate area didn't seem to be on fire....just a bit to the north and west.
We were going to go up fairview canyon and down passed Schofield, but fairview canyon was blocked off. We ended up backtracking south and heading up on top of Skyline to take the long way around. Once on top of skyline we could see exactly why fairview canyon was closed. The entire far mountain looked to be on fire, and it looked like the next ridge east was on fire too. We cooked 20 miles or so on dirt to pavement, then took pavement to get back to the north part of the skyline drive. Again, the road was blocked and they forced us down towards schofield. No traffic on any of these roads save for us, a few horse trailers, and fire crews heading in. I'm assuming this fire was the carbon county fire and it looked HUGE.
From skyline, we could see west out towards i15 and there was a really large plume of smoke over there too. We could see what looked like 3, and maybe as many as 5, significant fires from on top. Crazy and scary stuff.
