2026 wildfire Grant County, Oregon

Cottonwood

Two organizations, five nights apart, and two ways of drawing heat on the same fire, point by point and as areas.

Nights of maps: 2; August 8 to August 13
Map sets delivered: 2; From two flying teams
Heat sources on the busiest map: 16,345; Whole fire, night of August 8
Acres on the incident record: 722; Read September 13, 2026

The delivered topographic map sheet for the Cottonwood fire, pink heat sources and pink dotted areas of scattered heat inside the long red daily fire perimeter, the legend and title block at the left. — Hummingbird Drones' topographic sheet, flown for a perimeter scan and a full scan of the fire with a focus on the 100 foot mop up buffer: 280 isolated heat sources and four areas of scattered heat inside the incident's daily fire perimeter in red. The heat detections date it to the night of August 13; the note on the record says every hotspot within 500 feet of the perimeter, and every scattered heat area, was validated. Open the PDF the incident received

Where it burned

Cottonwood burned along Cottonwood Creek, which runs the length of the fire on its map sheets, with Lost Boy Butte to the west. On Hummingbird Drones’ map the areas of scattered heat sit in the creek bottom, and the single heat sources spread up the slopes on either side.

Two flights, five nights apart

Cottonwood was reported on August 6 in Grant County, with a human cause on the record. Two organizations flew it through the system, five nights apart, and both maps carried the incident’s daily fire perimeter in red.

Every warm spot

The Oregon Department of Forestry flew it first, at 3:34 on the morning of August 9, with a DJI Mavic 3T and the objective to map hotspots. The map came back with 16,345 isolated heat sources, a point for every warm spot picked out of the imagery across the fire, most of them packed into the south end.

Then the areas

Five nights later Hummingbird Drones flew a perimeter scan and a full scan of the fire, focused on the 100 foot mop up buffer, in light rain at the start. Where heat sources sat close together, that map drew them as areas of scattered heat, and it marked the rest one at a time: 280 of them.

Both are the same product, with the same symbols and the same colors. The difference between them is how each crew chose to draw the heat, and a firefighter who has read one can read the other.

What the Collaborative did

Two flying teams. The system did the rest.

Every map set on this fire came back as two thermal map sheets, one on aerial imagery and one on a topographic base, with a daily log, a Google Earth file and the GIS layers, on the flying organization’s own template.

12 files in the public archive Filed by night under the folder and file names the interagency share uses, free for anyone to open.
2 map sets carry the daily fire perimeter The incident’s own interagency perimeter, pulled onto the map in red beside the drone’s pink heat.

Delivered to the incident

More thermal map sheets from Cottonwood

Pink is a drone Red came from elsewhere How to read the map

A topographic map sheet of the same fire, the inside of the red daily fire perimeter nearly filled with thousands of small pink heat sources, densest at the south end. — The Oregon Department of Forestry's sheet from 3:34 am on August 9, flown with a DJI Mavic 3T to map hotspots: 16,345 isolated heat sources inside the daily fire perimeter, one for every warm spot picked out of the imagery, the most on any single map in the archive this season. Open the PDF

The archive, night by night

Every map set

2 map sets over 2 nights

One row per map set, grouped by night. A flight after midnight counts with the night before it, and the archive files each night under the next day's date, the operational period its maps served. Where two flights covered the same ground in one night, a heat source can appear on both maps, so the nightly numbers are not added into a trend.

Oregon Department of Forestry
Hummingbird Drones

Night	Flown	Area	By	Heat sources	Possible heat	Mop up buffer	Archive
August 8	3:34 am	Whole fire		16,345	0	None	Open the night
August 13	9:40 am	Perimeter scan^*		280	0	None	Open the night

Counted September 13, 2026 from the submission records and the public archive.

2 records on this fire are not counted because they were never approved for release.
* The pilot typed a different night for this flight. The heat detections’ own timestamps place it on the night shown, which is where the archive files it; the sheet itself keeps the typed date.

Where the images came from

Both sheets on this page are the PDFs delivered to the incident and published in the public archive, rendered as images. The name of the pilot printed in each title block is covered, because this site names organizations, not people.
The objectives and notes quoted on this page are from the submission records.
The incident record is the interagency record in WFIGS, read September 13, 2026.

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