Cottonwood Fire — Grant County, Oregon

2026 fire · archived record · NIFC lists this incident as “COTTONWOOD” · 15 Miles SW from LONG CREEK, OR

The Cottonwood Fire burned in Grant County, Oregon, 38 mi (62 km) E of Mitchell. The last size NIFC published for it was 722 acres, at 100% containment. It was first reported on August 6, 2026, and the cause is recorded as human.

Size

722 acres

Contained

100%

Discovered

August 6, 2026

Cause

Human

Personnel assigned

295

Complexity

Type 3 Incident

Protecting agency

DOF

Fuel

Timber (Grass and Understory)

Fire behaviour

Minimal

Show this fire on the live map

What the containment figure means

Crews have a control line all the way around this fire. That is not the same as the fire being out — a fire can be 100% contained and still burning inside that line for weeks. NIFC does not report a fire as out until the whole thing is cold.

How far it is from town

Straight-line distance and the direction you would look from each town to reach the fire's reported point of origin. A large fire is tens of miles across, so its nearest edge is closer than this — these are distances to the origin point NIFC publishes, not to the fire's edge.

Mapped perimeter

The mapped perimeter encloses 722 acres, as of the mapping run on Aug 7, 2026, 11:12 PM PDT. Perimeter acreage and reported acreage routinely disagree, and the mapped figure can go down when a fire is flown or walked properly for the first time — that is a correction to the map, not the fire shrinking.

How this fire grew

Every figure below is a value FireWatcher observed on NIFC's feed at that time, kept because NIFC does not publish a history. Daily change can be negative: reported acreage is revised downward when a fire is mapped properly, and complexes reassign acreage between member fires.

Where to get official information

FireWatcher does not carry evacuation levels and is not an official source. Evacuation levels for this fire are issued by the Grant County Sheriff's Office, not by any of the feeds on this page. If you are deciding whether to leave, use these:

• OR-Alert — the state's emergency alert system. Sign up before you need it.
• Central Oregon Fire Info — the interagency public information site for fires in this region.
• InciWeb — official incident pages for larger fires, published by the managing agency.
• NWS Pendleton and NWS Portland — red flag warnings and fire weather watches.

Other fires burning nearby

• Bologna Fire
  4,436 acres · 100% contained · Grant County
• Crosswhite Fire
  342,923 acres · 93% contained · Wheeler County
• Second Flat Fire
  105,854 acres · 99% contained · Harney County
• Grasshopper Fire
  93,999 acres · 96% contained · Wasco County
• Porcupine Ridge Fire
  79,200 acres · 100% contained · Gilliam County
• Shingle Fire
  73,183 acres · 95% contained · Wheeler County
• Brewer Fire
  70,821 acres · 100% contained · Jefferson County
• Hoag Fire
  50,224 acres · 100% contained · Gilliam County

Where these numbers come from

Incident name, acreage, containment, cause, personnel and complexity are read straight from the National Interagency Fire Center's WFIGS interagency feed (CC-BY 3.0), which FireWatcher polls every five minutes; this page was built from the poll at Sep 11, 2026, 1:19 PM PDT (just now). Perimeters come from the same source. Satellite heat is NASA FIRMS VIIRS. Weather is the National Weather Service. Aircraft positions are ADS-B via adsb.lol (ODbL 1.0). Camera positions are ALERTWest / University of Oregon and ODOT TripCheck. Distances are computed here from the published point of origin.

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