Put out your campfire — summer restrictions start Friday

It’s time to put out your campfire on public land in Southern Nevada.

Fire restrictions start Friday on land managed by the Bureaus of Land Management and Reclamation, the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nevada Division of Forestry.

Building campfires, welding, and using charcoal stoves, explosives and fireworks will be prohibited in areas including Lake Mead, Mount Charleston, Valley of Fire State and Beaver Dam state parks, according to Division of Forestry spokesman Jorge Gonzales.

The list of affected parks may grow, Gonzales said, pending state approval.

It is expected to be a long, dry and hot summer in Nevada, bringing with it the danger of wildland fires across much of the state in the midst of a fourth year of extreme drought.

Nevada has been fortunate to avoid losing much acreage to wildfire in the first three years of the current drought, with 59,252 acres burned in 2014 and 162,841 acres burned in 2013. By comparison, in 1999 nearly 1.9 million acres burned in Nevada.

But 2013 was significant for Southern Nevada, where firefighters battled the Carpenter 1 fire. Nearly 30,000 acres of the Mount Charleston area burned in that fire in July 2013.

The Mount Charleston area is identified as at high risk for fire again this year.

Contact Kimberly De La Cruz at kdelacruz@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Find her on Twitter: @KimberlyinLV