Fire crews saw conditions unexpectedly worsen on Tuesday, with gusty winds pushing a wildfire closer to Sun Valley Resort's ski area and forcing hundreds more homes to be evacuated in the valley below.
The fire has burned more than 64 square miles of spruce, fir and pine trees, keeping crews busy near a summit lodge adorned with fading pictures of Ernest Hemingway, Gary Cooper and Tyrone Power, past visitors to the ski area founded in 1936.
Amid the smoke, managers opted to run ski lifts — not for people, but to keep errant flames from cooking cables that ferry more than 200,000 visitors up the slopes each winter.
As the fire burned up the west side of 9,150-foot Bald Mountain, Blaine County officials expanded a mandatory evacuation order to the northern part of Ketchum, on the other side of the mountain. Residents in about 2,000 homes now have been asked to leave since lightning started the blaze Aug. 17. No structures have burned.
Firefighters had expected winds to die down on Tuesday after gusty conditions on Sunday fanned the blaze.
"This latest evacuation order was due to the fire conditions, the burnout operations and the increased possibility for fire spotting," said Bob Beanblossum, a fire information officer. "The fire activity is still currently outside the ski area boundaries."
Sixty Idaho Army and Air National Guard soldiers were assisting residents, going door to door to make sure they followed the mandatory order, said Bettyann Mummert, a local Red Cross official.
They were being taken to the Blaine County Community Campus in Hailey, 12 miles south of Ketchum.
The Sun Valley Resort, a mile east of Ketchum, was not part of the evacuation.
Jack Sibbach, a spokesman for the Sun Valley Co., which runs the 510-room resort, said accommodations were roughly 90 percent full, though guests had begun some cancellations, including a 36-person group that opted to leave the valley.
"We understand safety has to come first," Sibbach said.
A wall of smoke greets motorists along state Highway 75 into the Wood River Valley, where the ski area is. Many nearby mountains are obscured.
More than 1,650 fire personnel from across the nation are fighting the blaze, considered the region's top priority, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. That's in part because more than half of Blaine County's $12 billion in net taxable value is in homes in Sun Valley and Ketchum, both towns potentially in the fire's path.
