More than 200 employees are fighting or had fought a total of 41 fires in the Klondike area as of early June.

A Dempster Highway fire has cost more than $900,000 so far, eating up the lion’s share of the almost $2 million that’s been spent here during the first three weeks of the fire season.

An average season would see 50 to 55 fires in the Klondike area over five or six weeks. But Kelvin Leary, the regional officer in charge of field operations for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, readily admits that this seasons is well ahead of the average. It usually begins around Canada day. This year, it began early, on the evening of the summer solstice.

"We had no fires burning in the district and one fire had burned in late April," Leary said. "We had 14 strikes the first night, and it just went from there."

By June 24, there were 34 fires. Ten have been extinguished by Leary’s legions of fire fighters, but there have been more started, and the prime fire season is less than half-exhausted.

Usually, the Dawson area’s resources are committed to fighting fires on the basis of an "action plan". That designates the zone within which fires will receive attention. It’s a corridor about nine kilometres wide on either side of the Klondike Highway, large circles of space around settlements, resources areas, important historic sites and transportation corridors.

Normally, with four to six fires starting in a short time, it’s possible to react with the plan, but it has had to be set aside this summer. Too many of the fires are close to the zone, and they’ve all started too quickly to handle in such a fashion. People and equipment have been moved around to handle the greatest needs.

Leary agree the process could be likened to a kind of environmental triage. That’s a medical procedure in which priority treatment is meted out on the basis of greatest need according to pre-determined degrees of urgency.

Last Sunday afternoon, the greatest urgency was at the Gravel Lake area, south of Dawson on the Klondike Highway. A previously-controlled fire had jumped to the north side of road and threatened the Burkhardt homestead from a new angle, and some empty and inhabited cottages.

It was 3:30 pm, the time of day when the afternoon's growing heat overcomes the cooling effect of the night and early morning. Fires tend to flare up again, and Leary tried to get the highway closed at mid afternoon.

"Fire number 15 was 12 miles back from the Clinton Creek turnoff one day in our assessment. It was at the Clinton Creek turnoff the next -- in 36 hours."

Similarly, the Dempster fire, the one that closed the highway, moved like lightning. It was started by lightning, in fact, as probably 96 percent or more of all the fires this summer have been. The spotter who reported it saw the lightning strike.

The fire spread to two acres while the report was going in, and had mushroomed to more than 640 acres (1.5 square km) by the time the response team got there.

The situation is similar in Alaska. Normally, the state and the territory trade assistance during the height of the fires season. This year, both jurisdictions have been too busy fighting their own fires to send anyone anywhere else.

Last summer saw thick smoke blow in from fires in the Mayo area. A few years ago, the Prairie provinces complained of smoke blowing down from the North. Rain can take the smoke out of the air, but Yukon storms are a mixed blessing.

Said Leary: "These tend to be… for instance, it rained 21 mm in town the other day (last Thursday), but you could drive up the tower road (on the Second Dome) in the morning because there hadn’t been that kind of rain on the top of the Dome.

"It rained right down in the valley here -- it poured -- but we didn’t get that kind of rain in the places where we wanted it. Usually, you have a core of rain, and then on the outside of it you have dry lighting."

"Thunderstorms' biggest problem is the erratic turbulence and the high winds," he said.

"You get a 180-degree wind shift, and what was once a safe, relatively inactive line in a place for our men to work, 10 minutes later can be a blowout... an escaped fireline which is no longer a safe place for anybody."

The other big fire in the Dawson area is at Swede Creek, about 16 kilometres up on the west side of the Yukon. The large mushroom effect of smoke that Dawsonites saw on the evening of June 28 was the result of crews setting a backfire to cut off the fuel supply to that fire.

Ideally, the larger fire will suck the smaller one into it, creating that sort of effect while it clears away the fuel towards which the larger fire is racing.

Most of the fires in the Klondike have been too hot and too erratic for what Leary calls a "direct attack." Instead, the crew have been relying on distance fighting tactics: cutting fire breaks, using air support, and chasing the head of the fire to divert it.

It's a long, expensive process, and it's going to go on for at least another three weeks.

There has been rain and cooler weather in the Klondike this week, which has eased the risk.