New Threats From Arizona Wildfire

A windblown wildfire that already has destroyed more than 300 mountaintop homes pushed into a previously untouched subdivision, burning five cabins and threatening 60 others, a fire official said Saturday.

The losses occurred during the night in Willow Canyon, one of three areas in the Santa Catalina Mountains threatened by the fire that has already blackened 68,000 acres over two-and-a-half weeks.

Firefighters set backfires and cleared brush Saturday to defend homes in other areas, an observatory owned by the University of Arizona and an array of communication towers used by television stations and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Pruett Small, the operations section chief for the team fighting the fire, said the fire would continue to threaten Willow Canyon from other directions over the next day or two. Willow Canyon is a collection of older cabins on U.S Forest Service land.

The human-caused fire began on June 17 and destroyed 317 homes last month in and around the vacation hamlet of Summerhaven on Mount Lemmon. It was about 55 percent contained.

George Dyer and his wife, Henrietta Terrazas, bought a cabin in Willow Canyon in 1991. They didn't believe their cabin burned, but weren't surprised by this summer's fire.

"We thought it was inevitable," George Dyer said. "That thing is a tinder box up there."

The fire also was pushing toward the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains on the northeastern fringe of Tucson, and fire officials asked residents of about 50 upscale homes to evacuate so fire trucks would have the roads to themselves.

However, because of thin desert vegetation the fire posed little threat to homes in the foothills, said Gail Aschenbrenner, a fire information officer.

In northern New Mexico, calmer wind, lower temperatures and high humidity during the night helped crews battling a mountain wildfire that had burned to within a half mile of Taos Pueblo and forced campers to evacuate.

The fire, which officials suspect was started by lightning, had covered about 700 acres north of the resort town of Taos.

"We did a lot of good work last night," Carson National Forest fire information officer Ignacio Peralta said Saturday. He did not have an estimate of containment.

No homes were threatened by the fire early Saturday.

Elsewhere, additional crews were sent to north central Washington to battle a complex of wildfires in remote, rugged terrain about 20 miles north of Winthrop. The largest blaze had covered some 1,200 acres by Saturday, authorities said.

In Southern California, firefighters subdued a quick-moving wildfire Friday night after it burned 1,500 acres of brush in Riverside County.

No buildings were damaged but 25 to 30 homes were evacuated as a precaution until the fire was contained, said Jane Scribner, spokeswoman for the Riverside County Fire Department. The cause of the fire had not been determined.