The fire broke out Friday on private land in the wildlife reserve. According to California Incident Management Team 13, the fire is about 30 percent contained.
But, it’s not structures or people that are at-risk— it’s native species like joshua trees. Officials won’t know how many trees burned until the fire is out.
“In the next months, we'll be out, measuring and comparing what we had before in the survey to afterwards,” said Sierra Willoughby, a park ranger at the Mojave Wildlife Preserve.
Brief rains earlier this week helped contain some of the burn, but dry conditions are expected to return. Those conditions could continue to dry out the fuel bed and exacerbate the inferno. Officials are still investigating what ignited the fire.