©BC Wildfire Service

The aircraft churned through the Fraser Canyon night like an alien spectre, twin spotlights illuminating its surroundings but leaving its own bulk obscured. Only when the spectre drifted in front of a wall of orange did the oblongated form of a helicopter reveal itself. That helicopter, dropping water on the blazing hillside, offered a spark of hope for the small Fraser Canyon community of Boston Bar. Ten hours later, Boston Bar would be evacuated as crews braced for a potentially terrible day of fire weather and assessed the changing dynamics from the overnight growth of the blaze. When I stopped briefly in Boston Bar Wednesday evening around 11 p.m., a future evacuation order seemed almost inevitable. Two weeks earlier, the Brunswick Creek fire had broken out on the western side of the river and forced the evacuation of hundreds of rural and First Nation residents, including those in the small community of North Bend.