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© Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily SunA Blue Heron flies lazily across Marshall Lake beneath the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks on Thursday. After a winter of heavy snowfall, area lakes are at, or near, capacity.
Northern Arizona is seeing the dividends of this winter in area reservoirs and damp forests. What's less certain is this year's fire season. Despite this past week's wildfire in Timberline, firefighters expect the fire season to be moderate or light, because the big logs lying on the ground are still saturated from the snow.

But the finer fuels like grasses and twigs are beginning to dry, leading to the expectation of severe fires in grasslands and deserts at lower elevations. Depending on the weather and the wind, as seen last week in Timberline, the bigger fuels could dry, too.

"The future weather is what will determine whether it will be a moderate or severe fire season," said Buck Wickham, division chief of the Peaks Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest.

There will be fires, he said, as there are every year on this forest, which has the most fire starts of any national forest in the country, due mainly to lightning.

There's another factor at play, too. "Fire season hinges a lot on our monsoons," he said. "If they come in and are good as far as volume of precip, then we'll have a moderate fire season. But all of us have seen it where they don't really come in."

Fire tower staffing started a couple weeks later than usual this year, due in part to snowdrifts and downed trees blocking the roads. Firefighters are now cutting some of the many trees that have fallen across area roads, Wickham said. Vic Morfin, forest fuels specialist on the Coconino, expects to be sending firefighters to the desert and wildfires elsewhere this summer.

Record for Snow on the ground

Flagstaff set a record this year for the number of days with snow on the ground, said Daryl Onton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Bellemont. January's 54-inch snowstorm was the second-largest on record, and this winter has been colder than average, too.

In all, Flagstaff received 144.2 inches of snow this winter, the ninth-snowiest winter since the beginning of recordkeeping in 1899. The average is 109.4 inches, and the record is 210.

But Flagstaff is actually behind a little for the winter on precipitation -- the total amount of liquid water received from snow, sleet or rain.

That's partly because it was a dry fall, said Onton, and has become a drying spring.

"We had some very large storms earlier in the winter, but it hasn't been too wet since February or so," he said.

An El Nino system that sometimes brings moisture appears to be ending, with a drier pattern emerging, he said.