Two wildfires are still burning on private land in Siskiyou County, California, and neither has a containment percentage on file. The Quartz Fire started April 4 at 6:40 p.m. The Palomino Fire started April 7 at 2:24 p.m. [1] [2] The National Interagency Fire Center's entries for both read "containment status is unknown" and "cause of the fire remains undetermined."

The paper's Saturday brief noted the season opened early for California. What today's day-count records is that CAL FIRE's 2026 incident archive does not list either fire by name — private-land ignitions under the State Responsibility Area threshold fall off the state's public tracker. [3] The county itself is quiet. Local fire weather has stayed in single digits for humidity and low teens for fuel moisture since Easter.

Meanwhile the High Plains have already burned 1.1 million acres year-to-date — Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, the arc that the paper's drought lead framed Sunday as the Palmer Index 1895 signal. [3] Fire behavior experts on X read Siskiyou's unnumbered burns not as anomalies but as the new spring baseline — the kind of ignition a drier West generates before the lightning season starts and that the state's public tracker is structurally blind to.

Monday afternoon the forecast calls for 15 mph winds at the Klamath-ridge ignition points. A fire without a containment number is a fire the system has not yet admitted it is fighting.

-- DARA OSEI, London