By Judy Fahys
The Salt Lake Tribune
UINTAH COUNTY, Utah — Firefighters have doused the fires that have blackened thousands of acres of Utah wildlands this year, but one they’ve left smoldering in gilsonite mines in eastern Utah.
There’s not much else they can do to extinguish the still-smoking gilsonite, a black, glossy hydrocarbon resin that’s been mined for more than a century along the Utah-Colorado line near Bonanza.
“Those gilsonite mines could smolder for months and months,” said Kelsey Birchell, a fire information officer for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Vernal. “There’s no way to smother them.”
Flames kicked up on an old vein around a month ago, as the Wolf Den Fire burned the surrounding range.
That 20,000-acre fire was officially declared 100 percent contained on Thursday, Birchell said. But a fire truck — and minders — will be posted at the site 24/7 until the threat is completely gone. No one wants to see the range grass reignited, she said.
“With the gilsonite still smoldering,” Birchell added, “we want people to be careful out there.”
Also called uintaite, gilsonite has presented some unusual problems for firefighters. It flows like lava when it gets hot, so a fire crew from Oregon needed a tutorial before they tackled the flames.
Rain and fire hoses won’t snuff it out, noted Jeremy Raymond, director of the Uintah County Fire District. So, fire crews just have to wait till it runs completely out of steam.
“Now it’s calmed down,” he said. “It’s just smoking a little bit.”
J.C. Brewer, a retired jack-of-all-trades, grew up on a cattle ranch among the gilsonite seams in the Book Cliffs and has become a part-time historian of gilsonite. He agreed the fire will eventually suffocate itself.
“Just because there’s a vein that caught fire in a forest fire, that’s not anything for anybody to get excited about,” he said. “Gosh, no.”
After Sam Gilson stumbled upon the stuff on his way to join the Gold Rush in the mid-1800’s, his experiments with gilsonite led him to melt it into a varnish for buggies and beer barrels. Now it’s used for varnishes, paints, printing inks, asphalt mixes, oil drilling and metal casting.
American Gilsonite Co. mines the seams and sells its related products around the world.
Depending on who you talk to, the Uintah County deposits are the only ones in the world or the biggest of just a few worldwide.
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