The Pocket Fire north of Sedona grew to more than 784 acres as of Wednesday afternoon.
It’s 0% contained.
A lot of that growth came from crews burning the forest in preparation for windy and dry weather forecast this weekend.
KNAU’s Adrian Skabelund spoke with Southwest Incident Management Team spokesperson Dick Fleishman as he drove through Oak Creek Canyon.
ADRIAN SKABELUND: Would you mind describing what the scene looks like down there in the canyon? Obviously, no cars.
DICK FLEISHMAN: Yeah, no cars. We do have a lot of apparatus down here.
There are two structure-protection groups. Currently, there's a hotshot crew up at the very upper end by the switchbacks.
They're actually reopening the hand line that Mormon Lake Hotshots put in on the [2014] Slide Fire right now as a contingency. So they're pre-positioned, they know what they need, where they need to go, what they need to be putting in.
When that happens, that'll happen rather rapidly because we have all the equipment we need right here, right now.
SKABELUND: And is the canyon down there smoke-filled at this point? Or is the smoke kind of bypassing it above?
FLEISHMAN: No, there's some smoke only on the upper part of it where the fire is. But we could see when we popped off the rim, there's actually blue sky further down south. And we are still seeing smoke.
SKABELUND: Is it a little odd to be driving [State Route] 89A through Oak Creek in the middle of summer and have it so empty?
FLEISHMAN: Yeah, that's not normal. But we are seeing some of the people who have returned; some vehicles here that are not fire apparatus. Not a lot, not like you would expect.
What's really odd is when you drive by Slide Rock [State Park] and there's no one sliding.
SKABELUND: Right, right. Could you speak to the spot fires that you guys saw Tuesday?
FLEISHMAN: Sure. So spotting is, on a wildfire, any ember that's carried airborne and lands while it's still hot. So, they had about close to a dozen [Tuesday]. One got to about a half an acre.
So it was large enough to actually get picked up [by aircrews mapping the fire overnight]. But they got all around it. They have a lot of crews up there. So our night guys button those things up.
SKABELUND: So, in terms of these upcoming red flag conditions expected this weekend, what's kind of the big concern?
FLEISHMAN: Oh, winds that speed can just push embers out of our fire. You know, fortunately, our most recent infrared [observations are] showing very little heat on the east side towards Oak Creek Canyon.
It doesn't mean there couldn't be spots coming out of that. It's also supposed to be hot and extremely dry.
So it's probably going to be the most erratic fire behavior we've seen so far. And we've seen some pretty erratic fire behavior, just because of the high temperatures and low relative humidities. But we're just going to add one more ingredient to the soup here.
So we definitely are concerned. We're definitely on watch. It’s one of the reasons we did that firing operation before this weather came in. Basically, that's our catcher's mitt to catch any embers that start coming to the top.
SKABELUND: So, the hope there is that it's kind of a buffer?
FLEISHMAN: Yeah, it is. That firing operation we just made -- rather than [Forest Road] 231, which is about a 15-20 foot line, we just made it about a quarter-mile wide by removing the fuels.
SKABELUND: Dick, thanks so much for giving me some of your time today.
FLEISHMAN: All right.
Updated for additional information at 3:19 p.m. on June 24, 2026.
