Fires near Prineville, Oregon
Crook County seat, on the Crooked River · Crook County
The nearest active fire to Prineville is 22 miles SE.
- Nearest active fire
- 22 mi SE
- Its size
- 17,460 acres
- Its containment
- 96%
- Fires worth watching within 30 mi
- 2
Updated from the live feed just now. Open the live status page or the map.
Active fires near Prineville
Every fire currently burning within 100 miles of Prineville that is over an acre and not yet fully contained, nearest first. Distance and direction are measured from Prineville to each fire's reported location, not from a county centre. Names without a link are below the size this site writes a page for.
| Fire | Distance | Direction | Acres | Contained |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coyote Fire | 22 mi | SE | 17,460 | 96% |
| Round Butte Fire | 28 mi | NW | 1,163 | 98% |
| Bench Fire | 34 mi | NW | 4,000 | 90% |
| Fire 821 | 37 mi | ESE | 10 | — |
| Henry Fire | 46 mi | ESE | 29,844 | 97% |
| Crosswhite Fire | 47 mi | NE | 342,923 | 93% |
| Shingle Fire | 48 mi | ENE | 73,183 | 95% |
| Camel Hump Fire | 50 mi | NE | 6,789 | 90% |
| Grasshopper Fire | 74 mi | NNW | 93,999 | 96% |
| Austin Fire | 74 mi | NW | 12,831 | 36% |
| Deep Creek Fire | 81 mi | WSW | 56 | — |
| Second Flat Fire | 84 mi | SE | 105,854 | 99% |
| The Narrows Fire | 85 mi | NW | 304 | 89% |
| Ruggs Fire | 87 mi | NE | 1,300 | — |
| Avery Fire | 95 mi | N | 50 | — |
A further 27 incidents within 100 miles of Prineville are on the feed but not listed above — either under an acre (assist calls and smoke checks, which the feed carries alongside wildfires) or already reported 100% contained. Contained is not the same as out: a contained fire can burn inside its line for weeks. Everything within 100 miles, filtered or not, is on the map.
Why is it smoky in Prineville?
Air quality in Prineville is currently 28 — Good. Air quality is fine.
This is a modelled figure from Open-Meteo (CAMS model), not an instrument standing in Prineville. It is good for "is the air bad today"; it is not a regulatory measurement, and smoke can be much worse in one draw of a valley than the model shows.
The nearest active fire is 22 miles SE of Prineville. Smoke does not travel in a straight line from a fire and it settles overnight in the low ground, so Prineville can be smoky from a fire that is nowhere near it — Central Oregon regularly takes smoke from the Cascades and from northern California. A smoky morning here is at least as likely to be somebody else's fire as it is to be this one.
Has a satellite detected heat near Prineville?
1 satellite heat detection within 40 miles of Prineville in the last 24 hours, the nearest 31 miles away.
A detection is a thermal reading from an orbiting sensor, not a confirmed fire. It can be a wildfire, and it can also be a slash pile, a field burn, or a hot industrial roof. Several detections usually mean one fire, not several — a single incident lights up many pixels.
1 of them do not currently match a filed incident. That is worth knowing and it is not a warning: the most common reason is simply that the agency paperwork has not caught up with the satellite yet, and the second most common is that it was never a wildfire. FireWatcher shows it because a service that only ever repeats what a human already confirmed can never show you this at all.
Source: VIIRS_NOAA20_NRT, 24 hours window.
Fire weather for Prineville
The National Weather Service has no active alert posted for Prineville.
Are any roads closed near Prineville?
ODOT has no fire-related road closure or restriction reported within 25 miles of Prineville right now. Conditions change quickly during an incident — TripCheck is the authority.
Are fire cameras watching Prineville?
5 fire-watch cameras within 40 miles of Prineville are online. These are the ALERTWildfire / ALERTWest network cameras run with the University of Oregon — the same cameras dispatchers look at, pointed at ridgelines rather than roads.
- Powell Butte — 10 mi SW
- Grizzly Mtn — 11 mi NNW
- Cline Butte — 23 mi W
- Henkle Butte — 32 mi W
- Pine Mtn 1 — 34 mi S
Open them on the map to see the current image. A camera is the fastest way to settle "is that smoke or is that a cloud" without waiting for anybody to file anything.
Are aircraft working a fire near Prineville?
No firefighting aircraft are currently tracked within 60 nautical miles of Prineville. 3 aircraft nearby could not be identified either way, and are not counted as firefighting.
Aircraft are tracked from public ADS-B broadcasts. Not every aircraft transmits, and tankers on the ground do not appear at all, so an empty result here is not proof that nothing is flying.
What burns near Prineville
Prineville sits in the Crooked River valley at the western edge of the Ochoco National Forest, which is the ground most fires near town are burning on. The pattern that matters here is the change in fuel with elevation: juniper and sagebrush on the valley floor and the rimrock, ponderosa pine once you climb east into the Ochocos. A fire reported "20 miles east of Prineville" is almost always a timber fire in the forest; one on the flats is usually grass and juniper, which moves faster and is out sooner.
US‑26 is the road that matters — east past Ochoco Reservoir toward Mitchell, west toward Redmond. Closures on it show up on this site under road conditions, and a US‑26 closure east of town is the single most common fire-related travel disruption in Crook County.
When is fire season in Central Oregon?
Central Oregon's fire season generally runs from late June into October, and the shape of it matters more than the dates. The east side of the Cascades is dry every summer by design — this is high desert — so the question is never whether the fuel will be dry but what lands in it.
Two peaks are typical. Early season fires tend to be human-caused: roadside starts, equipment, escaped debris burns, and they cluster near roads and towns. Mid-to-late summer brings dry lightning, which starts fires in the Ochocos and the Cascades all at once and in places nobody can drive to — which is why a single storm can put a dozen new incidents on this map overnight and why some of them stay small for days before anyone reaches them.
Fire season also has an administrative meaning: the Oregon Department of Forestry and the local protection districts declare it, and the declaration sets what is legal — burn bans, equipment rules, chainsaw hours, campfire restrictions. Those are set by district and change during the summer. ODF publishes the current restrictions; this site does not carry them, because a restriction that is one week out of date is worse than none.
Who to follow for an evacuation
This page carries no evacuation level, and it is not a warning system. Evacuation levels in Oregon — Level 1 Be Ready, Level 2 Be Set, Level 3 Go Now — are issued by your county sheriff and nobody else. For Prineville that is the Crook County Sheriff.
Sign up for OR‑Alert so a notification reaches you without opening anything, and read what the three levels actually mean. In an emergency call 911.
Where these numbers come from
Fire locations, size and containment are from NIFC / WFIGS, the interagency feed the agencies themselves file to. Satellite heat is NASA FIRMS, alerts are the National Weather Service, road conditions are ODOT TripCheck. Distances on this page are computed from Prineville's coordinates to each fire's reported location — not from a county centroid.
Containment is the share of a fire's edge crews have a line around, not how much of it is out. More on what containment means.
Open the live map Fire archive
Other Central Oregon towns
- Fires near Redmond — Deschutes County, on US‑97
- Fires near Bend — Deschutes County, against the Deschutes National Forest
- Fires near Madras — Jefferson County seat, at the US‑97 and US‑26 junction
- Fires near Sisters — Deschutes County, at the foot of the Cascades