Editor’s Note: Whatcom Watch has entered a cooperative agreement with Salish Current. Salish Current, an online-only news organization, covers the North Sound area and Whatcom Watch mainly covers Whatcom County issues. Visit https://salishcurrent.org.
A resident’s discovery of a still-burning campfire highlights confusing rules amid rising risk
by Bodey Mitchell
Samish neighborhood resident Betsy Gross was on her near-daily walk through the Samish Crest Open Space in Whatcom County last month when she reached the overlook and found a campfire that had not been fully extinguished. Flames still flickered underneath some half-burned logs. A pair of plastic Adirondack chairs sat nearby.
Gross called 911. Within 10 minutes, four firefighters hiked up from the Wildwood neighborhood with shovels, rakes and suppressant and put the fire out.
In the conversation that followed, Gross said the firefighter in charge told her recreational fires were not illegal in the area. The city’s rules, however, state that recreational fires are not allowed when a more restrictive fire-danger burn ban is in effect.
Only after she got home and checked did Gross learn that a burn ban was in effect at the time.
Bellingham’s recreational-fire ban was in effect until Sept. 11, when the city lifted it after recent rain. Even when recreational fires are allowed, city rules require fires to be attended at all times, fully extinguished upon leaving, kept at least 25 feet from structures and combustible materials and accompanied by an adequate means of extinguishing the fire.
The incident was not unique. Gross, who has hiked the trails for more than 20 years, said spent campfires are a recurring sight at the overlook. She has previously called the fire department about other active or smoldering fires in the woods, including one started by middle-school-age boys in a brushy section several years ago.
“I told (the firefighter in charge) that it’s not uncommon for us or some hiker to chance upon a fire up there,” Gross said. “It’s so dry, and we’re very concerned.”
The City of Bellingham confirmed it received a few reports of fires at Samish Crest in early September, including one extinguished by the Bellingham Fire Department and another on private property subject to the county’s burn ban. In response, Parks and Recreation installed temporary warning signs.
For residents and regular trail users, the pattern has raised larger questions about prevention in an increasingly dry landscape that sits close to neighborhoods.
Washington had an unusually severe wildfire season across the state. By Aug. 1, more than 1,000 wildfires had burned about 425,000 acres statewide, according to the governor’s office. The state declared a wildfire emergency amid droughts, unusually high temperatures and high winds, with officials warning that dry conditions were leaving landscapes vulnerable to new ignitions.
By late August, Whatcom County’s fire danger was rated “very high” in both the lowlands and the Cascades, according to a county emergency management briefing. The county also noted that the state Department of Ecology had declared a drought that included Whatcom County. At the time, the county was under a stage 2 burn ban that prohibited all outdoor burning.
‘Let’s Fix It’
“I tell people to walk around your house with an imaginary box of matches and ask yourself what happens if I throw a match there,” said Robert Walters, the community wildfire resilience specialist at the Whatcom Conservation District. “If it’s a bad thing, then let’s fix it.”
The district offers free, confidential and non-regulatory wildfire home risk assessments for homeowners across Whatcom County. The assessments are customized to individual properties and provide homeowners with a report identifying actions they can take to improve their properties’ resilience to wildfire.
“I look at the house as the log,” Walters said. “Then we’re identifying the tinder and the kindling around the house, and we’re going to give them mitigation actions to solve that.”
Walters explained that the majority of homes destroyed in wildfires are not set ablaze by nearby trees. Embers that are often carried by winds are responsible for most home losses.
He compares the house to a log in a campfire: by itself it won’t easily ignite. What catches first is the “tinder and kindling” around it — dry vegetation, mulch, wooden fences or outdoor furniture. The Conservation District’s wildfire home risk assessments focus on these vulnerabilities in the home ignition zone, particularly the critical first five feet around a structure.
For residents living next to Samish Crest, that advice is especially relevant. Walters described the area as a wildland-urban intermix where homes and dense vegetation are closely intertwined, and said the hillside topography can accelerate fire spread.
“From a fuels approach, it’s the topography,” Walters said. “Fires travel a lot faster uphill, and, in that geographic location, you’re also going to have offshore winds coming in, pushing the fire even harder and faster.”
Unattended or poorly extinguished campfires compound that risk. Walters said even an attended fire can become dangerous without the right tools and knowledge on hand, and an unattended one in heavy fuels is “a sudden gust of a breeze away from turning into a wildfire.”
Education and prevention, Walters said, remain the most effective tools for reducing risk.
“Education is the primary way to change behaviors,” he said. “If we don’t know something’s bad, we’re just going to keep on doing it.”
Better Signs and Other Public Awareness
After a series of campfires in September, the City of Bellingham placed new signage at Samish
Walters supports clear, nonaccusatory signage as a practical first step. Friendly reminders, he said, tend to work better than purely disciplinary messages. At Clark’s Point, residents posted trail signs warning that a small campfire can lead to a large forest fire and urging people not to leave fires unattended.
Gross and other regular users of Samish Crest have pushed for similar permanent signs at the main trailheads. Temporary signs installed by the city after Gross raised concerns were later removed or disappeared. Gross hopes the city and county will install more durable warnings and that neighborhood associations will help spread basic fireawareness information.
Looking ahead, Walters said extended drought and accumulating fuels — including a regional die-off of Western red cedar — could raise the stakes in future summers. For now, the most immediate steps remain straightforward: better public awareness, clearer rules and practical prevention around both open spaces and the homes that border them.
Read the original article here: https://salish-current.org/2026/10/22/samish-crestfires-raise-concerns-about-prevention-in-urban-adjacent-woods/
__________________________________
Bodey Mitchell is a fifth-year Western Washington University student majoring in journalism news/editorial. He loves reporting on local and environmental issues.
