Large wildfires near Carson City, Reno and Lake Tahoe since 1980

Each row is one mapped fire: name, year, mapped acres and the cause on record. Most older rows say the cause was not recorded, and that is a gap in the national file, not a finding. Use the table to see how often large fire has been part of this landscape, not to predict any single year.

Where this data comes from

The fire perimeters come from the National Interagency Fire Center. Its InterAgency Fire Perimeter History layer covers older fires, and its WFIGS layer covers 2020 to the present, including 2026 so far. We kept every perimeter of 300 acres or more since 1980 that falls in a box from 38.35 to 40.0 degrees north and 118.4 to 120.35 degrees west. That box reaches from the country north of Hawthorne to the Susanville side of the Sierra, so it includes California fires as well as Nevada ones.

The two source layers were built differently, so the table is a good picture of size and timing but a rough tool for counting fires year to year. Acreage is the mapped perimeter, which can differ from the final incident report, and the 2026 figures may not be final.

How to read the table

Sort by size and the story is simple: a handful of fires account for most of the burned acres. A perimeter that merely touches the box, such as Dixie in 2021, is included, so a large row does not always mean a fire close to town. If you want fires near a particular place, use the ten-mile counts below instead of the acreage column.

What stands out

• Four of the 40 largest perimeters are from 2026 so far: Bug (93,733 acres), Stallion (40,691), Hawk (15,083) and Elephant (13,930). Their acreage may still change.
• Four are from 2021 (Dixie, Caldor at 221,784 acres, Sugar and Tamarack at 67,054) and four are from 2020 (Loyalton, Slink, Mountain View and Numbers at 18,380).
• The count of mapped perimeters by decade runs 51 for the 1980s, 39 for the 1990s, 95 for the 2000s, 83 for the 2010s and 31 for 2020 through 2026.
• Where a cause is on record it is mostly human. Caldor, Bug, Stallion, Hawk, Numbers and Conner (17,714 acres, 2025) are listed as human-caused; Sugar, Tamarack and Loyalton as natural. For 268 of the 299 perimeters no cause is recorded.

Fires mapped near the towns we serve

Counting only perimeters whose center lies within about 10 miles of the town point, Cold Springs has 36, Reno 34, Sparks 31, Carson City 17, Dayton 10, Incline Village 8 and Minden 6. Fallon and Yerington have none. These are mapped within about 10 miles by centroid distance. A large fire can have burned much closer or farther than its center, so the count says where fire has been nearby, not what reached a street.

For the risk to homes in each community, see wildfire risk by community, which is a separate Forest Service dataset.

What it means for the trees on your lot

A long record of nearby fire is the reason fire districts ask owners to thin brush, remove dead trees and trim limbs away from the ground. The three zones in the UNR Extension Living With Fire guide run from 0 to 5 feet from the house, 5 to 30 feet and 30 to 100 feet. Battle Born Tree Service does the physical work, including limbing up, dead tree removal, brush mowing and masticating. See defensible space and fire mitigation and lessons from local wildfires.

Limits of the data

Only fires of 300 acres or more are included, so small fires that mattered to a neighborhood are not here. Names are as recorded by the agencies, and two rows named Unknown are perimeters with no name on file. Nothing in this table says a fire reached any particular home.