Minnesota Fire Map: Track Minnesota Wildfires Live in 2026

A Minnesota fire map fuses official NIFC incident records, NASA and NOAA satellite heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into one view of the state. Minnesota is a boreal, not a western, fire state: most fires start in spring before green-up, burn small and are human-caused. This page explains when, where and how to track one live.

What does a Minnesota fire map show right now?

A Minnesota fire map shows four layers at once: incidents agencies report to the national interagency system, mapped perimeters, satellite thermal detections and active National Weather Service fire-weather alerts. In Minnesota most of what appears is small, because crews catch the large majority of starts before they pass a few acres.

Incident records carry the numbers people quote: fire name, acres, percent contained, incident type and managing organization. In Minnesota that manager is usually the Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, a county, or the U.S. Forest Service's Superior National Forest, depending on whose land the fire reaches first.

Satellite detections move faster. NASA's MODIS and VIIRS instruments and NOAA's GOES satellites report heat within minutes to a few hours, which matters in Minnesota's roadless boreal forest and Boundary Waters wilderness, where a lightning start can smolder for days before anyone on the ground sees smoke. On the live map, each detection carries a fire probability tier built from whether an official record is linked and how recent the satellite heat is.

When is Minnesota's wildfire season?

Minnesota's wildfire season peaks in spring, not summer. State fire planners report that about three-quarters of Minnesota's roughly 1,500 average annual wildfires burn in April and May, the weeks after snowmelt exposes dead grass and leaf litter but before trees and undergrowth green up and hold moisture.

That spring window is Minnesota's most dangerous fire period. Grass and downed leaves cure over winter and dry out fast once snow cover drops below 3 inches, which is also the threshold below which the Department of Natural Resources requires an active burning permit for most open burning outside cities.

A second, smaller peak follows in fall, after the first hard frost cures grass and brush again and before snow returns. Minnesota's fire year varies sharply: agencies logged more than 2,200 wildfires in 2021, roughly 1,380 in 2024, and fewer than 600 in the quieter 2020 season.

The 2025 season showed how fast that can change. Fires burning near Brimson in northeastern Minnesota — the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires among them — destroyed roughly 150 structures and pushed May 2025 acreage past 40,000, more than three times the state's roughly 12,000-acre annual average, prompting Governor Tim Walz to activate the Minnesota National Guard.

Which agencies fight fires in Minnesota?

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources' Division of Forestry is the state's wildland fire agency. It issues burning permits, rates daily fire danger, and fights wildfires directly on state, county and private land alongside local fire departments.

Above individual fires sits the Minnesota Incident Command System (MNICS), an interagency cooperative whose members include the DNR, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the State Fire Marshal and Homeland Security and Emergency Management. MNICS dispatches crews and tracks statewide preparedness levels.

On federal land, the Superior National Forest carries much of northeastern Minnesota's fire load, including inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Above the state level, the Eastern Area Coordination Center, headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, mobilizes crews and aircraft across a twenty-state Eastern Area that includes Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

State agency

Minnesota DNR Division of Forestry

Interagency coordination

Minnesota Incident Command System (MNICS)

Geographic coordination

Eastern Area Coordination Center (EACC), Milwaukee, WI

Federal forest

Superior National Forest, including the BWCAW

Where do Minnesota wildfires usually burn?

Minnesota wildfires concentrate in the northern third of the state, where jack pine, black spruce and aspen forest meets peatland and the roadless Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. St. Louis, Lake, Cook, Itasca and Koochiching counties account for most large fires.

Central and northwestern Minnesota carry a different risk: cured grass and cropland stubble that can run fast in a spring windstorm. DNR spring burning restrictions in 2026 covered counties from Becker and Kittson in the northwest to Carlton and St. Louis in the northeast as dry, warm weather spread across the state.

The northeastern corner is different again. Lake cabins and resorts along the Gunflint Trail sit inside or beside the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters, where dense conifer, blowdown debris and thin soil over peat create some of the state's most difficult fire terrain, as the 2007 Ham Lake Fire showed.

What makes Boundary Waters and peatland fires different?

Minnesota's most distinctive fire behavior happens in two places: the roadless Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where lightning ignites fires deep in terrain crews can only reach by canoe or floatplane, and the state's peatlands, where fire can burn underground in old plant matter instead of through the forest canopy.

The Boundary Waters is lightning country. The 2011 Pagami Creek Fire started from a lightning strike east of Ely and stayed small for weeks before a mid-September wind event drove it roughly 16 miles in a single day, eventually burning 92,682 acres — the largest naturally occurring wildfire in Minnesota in more than a century.

Not every Boundary Waters fire starts naturally. The 2007 Ham Lake Fire began as an uncontrolled campfire off the Gunflint Trail and burned 75,851 acres on both sides of the U.S.–Canada border, destroying more than 140 structures and forcing evacuation of the corridor — a reminder that wilderness fire risk still starts with people.

Minnesota's peatlands add a second, slower hazard. Peat can run 2 to 3 feet deep and, once dry, smolders underground rather than burning with open flame, moving sideways beneath the surface and resisting rain. Crews have injected water at rates up to 175,000 gallons per acre to fully extinguish a peat fire.

"We have to get in there and basically drown the heck out of it," said Gil Knight, a spokesman for the multiagency team fighting a fire that grew from 4,000 to 24,848 acres north of Red Lake, in Firehouse.

A decade after Pagami Creek, Superior National Forest zone fire manager Patty Johnson described the same land recovering: fire "puts nitrogen back into the soils, opens up the sites for the seeds to really take off, and knocks back all of the other brush and competing vegetation," she told Quetico Superior Wilderness News, which reported the regeneration ten years later.

What are the largest wildfires in Minnesota history?

Minnesota's record fire is more than a century old. The Great Hinckley Fire killed at least 418 people on September 1, 1894, after a summer drought let scattered blazes near Hinckley merge into a firestorm — still the deadliest wildfire disaster in Minnesota history.

Modern Minnesota fires are smaller by comparison but still significant. The Pagami Creek Fire of 2011 and the Ham Lake Fire of 2007 both burned in the Boundary Waters region and remain the state's two largest wildfires of the last several decades, and the 2025 season added two more names to the list.

Acreage alone understates the picture. The Hinckley fire is remembered for its death toll, the Ham Lake and Pagami Creek fires for how they behaved inside roadless wilderness, and the 2025 fires for how much damage a few thousand acres can do near cabins and small towns.

What weather drives Minnesota fire danger?

Minnesota fire danger rises fastest when low humidity and wind arrive on top of already-dry fuel, most often in the gap between snowmelt and green-up. The National Weather Service issues Red Flag Warnings and Fire Weather Watches for Minnesota through its Duluth and Twin Cities/Chanhassen forecast offices.

A Red Flag Warning means the National Weather Service expects conditions — typically low relative humidity combined with sustained wind — that will let any new fire spread rapidly and become difficult to control. NWS Duluth covers northeastern Minnesota, including the Boundary Waters region, while NWS Twin Cities/Chanhassen covers the central and southern two-thirds of the state.

Both offices coordinate their fire-weather forecasts with the DNR's daily fire danger rating and burning-restriction map, and both publish their own Red Flag Warning products. A Fire Weather Watch signals that conditions may develop; a Red Flag Warning means they are expected soon enough to act on.

Wind matters as much as humidity. Northern Minnesota's open cut-over and blowdown areas, and the state's exposed spring landscape before leaf-out, let wind push a fire faster than the same fuel would carry it in summer — part of why spring is the state's highest-risk period.

How do evacuations work in Minnesota?

Minnesota has no single statewide evacuation-level system. County sheriffs order evacuations for wildfires in their county, and wording varies locally — Lake County has used plain "evacuation order" language, while St. Louis County has used "GO" alerts, both during the 2025 fires near Brimson and the Fernberg Road corridor.

During those fires, the Lake County Sheriff's Office ordered evacuation of the Fernberg Road corridor near Winton, and St. Louis County Sheriff Gordon Ramsay warned that the fire could push south toward the same area. A temporary evacuation point was set up at the Babbitt Municipal Building.

Inside the Boundary Waters and Superior National Forest, the U.S. Forest Service holds a separate authority: it can close the wilderness outright. In 2025 the Forest Service closed the BWCAW effective at midnight to keep visitors and firefighters apart from an active fire, on top of any county evacuation order.

How do you read a Minnesota fire map in 60 seconds?

A Minnesota fire map answers where a fire is, how big it is, and how fast conditions could change fastest when you read it in a fixed order. The sequence below takes under a minute, whether you're checking on a Boundary Waters trip or a fire near home.

1. Open the live fire map and filter to Minnesota, or allow location access to see fires within a set distance in miles.
2. Look for an official perimeter or incident record — it means the DNR, the Forest Service or another agency has confirmed and mapped the fire.
3. Check the fire's acres, percent contained, incident type and managing organization.
4. Check the timestamps: "Last NIFC update," "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat" show how current each number really is.
5. Scan for NWS Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches over your county or route.
6. Check your county's alert system, the DNR burning-restrictions map, or the Superior National Forest's alerts for BWCAW closures before you travel.

See our guide to reading a live US wildfire map for a layer-by-layer breakdown of what each icon and color means, and our guide to finding fires near you if you're traveling to northern Minnesota from out of state.

What does wildfire smoke do to Minnesota air quality?

Wildfire smoke is one of Minnesota's most widely felt fire impacts, reaching residents far from any actual fire. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency tracks air quality conditions statewide, and smoke is reported through the same EPA Air Quality Index used nationally.

The AQI uses six color-coded categories. An AQI value of 100 corresponds roughly to the level of the short-term national air quality standard for a pollutant, and Minnesota's air quality reporting follows that same national scale.

Minnesota's spring fire season overlaps with a season when Canadian boreal fires often send smoke south across the state, so a hazy sky does not always mean a fire is burning nearby. Our smoke and air quality guide covers how those overlays are built.

Frequently asked questions about the Minnesota fire map