Wildfire in the West

KDNK's News Director Morgan Neely has Wednesday's news, including longtime KDNK DJ Michael Francisco filing a racial discrimination suit against City Market and the Kroger Corporation for his arrest at the Carbondale grocer on Christmas Eve 2020. And, representatives of the Ute Mountain Utes want their 20,000 acre ranch near Gunnison designated as a reservation, while the Northwestern Band of the Shoshonee in Southeastern Idaho is changing the legacy of a tract of land that hides a fateful history.

A new study shows wildfires are burning more high-elevation areas, and that’s impacting the snowpack across the West.

The world of wildland firefighting has a lot of wonky lingo. But one key phrase is “fuel moisture” — and no, we’re not talking about oil and gas.

The Rocky Mountain region is experiencing more wildfires in the midst of drought and high temperatures. And more of those blazes are being caused by people as our population grows. The job of fire investigators has never been more important. They track down the spark that can lead to prosecutions and their work provides crucial data for studying fire causes.

KDNK's news team brings you local and regional news from the Mountain West.

High-elevation forests in the Rocky Mountain region are burning more now than at any point in the past 2,000 years. That's according to a new study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.