Picture Rock Fire — Lake County, Oregon

Active fire · data from NIFC, refreshed 4 minutes ago · 3 Miles N from Summer Lake, OR

The Picture Rock Fire is burning in Lake County, Oregon, 59 mi (94 km) SE of La Pine. NIFC's most recent report puts it at 1,228 acres and 100% contained. The largest size FireWatcher ever observed on the feed was 1,625 acres. It was first reported on August 16, 2026, and the cause is recorded as human.

Size

1,228 acres

Contained

100%

Discovered

August 16, 2026

Cause

Human

Personnel assigned

5

Complexity

Type 3 Incident

Protecting agency

BLM

Fuel

Tall Grass (2.5 feet)

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 1,198 acres, as of the mapping run on Aug 28, 2026, 11:07 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, 89 mi (144 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

• Green Mountain
  26 mi (42 km) away, fire lies S of the camera · currently panned elsewhere

ODOT TripCheck road cameras

• OR31 at Silver Lake MP47.3
  16 mi (26 km) away, fire lies ESE of the camera
• OR31 at Paisley
  25 mi (40 km) away, fire lies NNW 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 Lake 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

• 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
• Henry Fire
  29,844 acres · 97% contained · Crook 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, 12:34 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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