Uploaded June 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
It’s now been two years since the Bighorn fire just north of Tucson, Arizona. It lasted from June 5th until July 23rd of 2020, right as we were all settling in to to the COVID-19 pandemic. It felt like the world was ending, with the panic buying at the stores, lockdowns and our iconic mountain engulfed in flames. Neither the fire nor the pandemic was expected to last as long as it had. It started with a simple lightning strike on the west wide of the Catalina Mountains and over the course of a month it devoured burned almost 120,000 acres by the time it was put out. Over the past couple of years I reviewed all of the time lapse video taken from various cameras located across the Catalina mountains (known to locals as Mt. Lemmon) from the Southern Arizona Timelapses (youtube.com/c/SouthernArizonaTimelapses) channel on YouTube and matching up the days and times where the fire was visible and edited them together while learning how to use FinalCut Pro. The most interesting (and famous) day was on June 17th of 2022 where the fire reached the Mt. Lemmon fire department and they cleared the brush around the area around a structure to protect it (video of this day was widely circulated among popular media). I remember looking up at night in the evenings at Mt. Lemmon and feeling like the world was ending as the flames consumed the life of our mountain and the future of the pandemic seemed endless. In late June the fire had traveled from the western edge of the Catalinas to the eastern side and was dwindling. Our monsoon season had started, where microbursts of rain poured across the mountain, drenching the last of the fire and putting an end to the fire.
It’s now been two years since the Bighorn fire just north of Tucson, Arizona. It lasted from June 5th until July 23rd of 2020, right as we were all settling in to to the COVID-19 pandemic. It felt like the world was ending, with the panic buying at the stores, lockdowns and our iconic mountain engulfed in flames. Neither the fire nor the pandemic was expected to last as long as it had. It started with a simple lightning strike on the west wide of the Catalina Mountains and over the course of a month it devoured burned almost 120,000 acres by the time it was put out. Over the past couple of years I reviewed all of the time lapse video taken from various cameras located across the Catalina mountains (known to locals as Mt. Lemmon) from the Southern Arizona Timelapses (youtube.com/c/SouthernArizonaTimelapses) channel on YouTube and matching up the days and times where the fire was visible and edited them together while learning how to use FinalCut Pro. The most interesting (and famous) day was on June 17th of 2022 where the fire reached the Mt. Lemmon fire department and they cleared the brush around the area around a structure to protect it (video of this day was widely circulated among popular media). I remember looking up at night in the evenings at Mt. Lemmon and feeling like the world was ending as the flames consumed the life of our mountain and the future of the pandemic seemed endless. In late June the fire had traveled from the western edge of the Catalinas to the eastern side and was dwindling. Our monsoon season had started, where microbursts of rain poured across the mountain, drenching the last of the fire and putting an end to the fire.
