Coyote Fire — Crook County, Oregon

Active fire · data from NIFC, refreshed 4 minutes ago · NIFC lists this incident as “0500 COYOTE” · 5 Miles S from POST, OR

The Coyote Fire is burning in Crook County, Oregon, 22 mi (35 km) SE of Prineville. NIFC's most recent report puts it at 17,460 acres and 96% contained. It was first reported on July 16, 2026, and the cause is recorded as natural.

Size

17,460 acres

Contained

96%

Discovered

July 16, 2026

Cause

Natural

Personnel assigned

11

Complexity

Type 1 Incident

Protecting agency

USFS

Fuel

Brush (2 feet)

Fire behaviour

Minimal

Show this fire on the live map

What the containment figure means

Crews have a completed control line around 96% of this fire’s edge. The remaining 4% is where it can still spread.

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 17,460 acres, as of the mapping run on Jul 21, 2026, 12:27 AM 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.

Satellite heat

No VIIRS thermal detections have landed inside this fire's footprint in the last 24 hours. That is normal for a fire that is mostly out, and also normal for one that is burning under a smoke layer or between satellite overpasses — the polar orbiters pass roughly four times a day. Source: NASA FIRMS VIIRS (NOAA-20, 375 m).

Fire weather and where the smoke is going

Read at Prineville Airport, 22 mi (35 km) from this fire — the one point FireWatcher polls the National Weather Service for. It is regional context, not this fire's own weather, and over that distance it can be wrong.

70°F, 28% relative humidity, wind 0 mph from the N gusting 12 mph.

The transport wind — the layer that actually carries a smoke column — is 7 mph out of the W, so smoke from fires in this area is being pushed toward the east, with a mixing height around 500 ft — the lower that number, the more smoke stays down where people breathe it.

Cameras near this fire

ALERTWest fire cameras

• Hampton Butte
  25 mi (40 km) away, fire lies NNW of the camera · currently panned elsewhere
• Powell Butte
  25 mi (40 km) away, fire lies ESE of the camera · currently panned elsewhere

ODOT TripCheck road cameras

• Crook County - Juniper Canyon Fire Station
  14 mi (23 km) away, fire lies ESE of the camera
• 3rd St at Harwood MP18.35
  23 mi (37 km) away, fire lies SE of the camera

Live views are on the map. ALERTWest units are mountaintop pan-tilt-zoom cameras and they move, so "panned toward the fire" is where the camera was pointed at the last data refresh, not a promise of what is in frame. TripCheck cameras are fixed and look at the road, not at the fire.

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 Crook 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

• Henry Fire
  29,844 acres · 97% contained · Crook County
• Green Mountain Fire
  2,136 acres · 100% contained · Crook 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

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, 12:29 PM PDT (4 minutes ago). 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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