Photo showing orange haze from wildfire smoke as backdrop for City Garden towers in downtown Kamloops. Photo taken at 6:58pm, July 7, 2026, more than two hours before sunset/via Radio NL

All signs are pointing to an out-of-control situation forming out of the Fraser Canyon this afternoon as crews with the Coastal Fire Centre struggle to keep up with the rapidly spreading fire.

This fire — which took hold on Friday as little more than a 10-hectare blaze just north of Boston Bar on the west side of the Fraser River — has now become an equally large, if not larger problem, on the east side of the Fraser River.

Strong winds on Sunday began helping move the Brunswick Creek fire up the steep mountain slopes.

This prevented ground crews from gaining access to the rugged area to cut out fire breaks, which allowed the fire to jump up to over 12-square kilometers in size by the time the weekend was over.

That wind on Sunday also set loose a series of embers from the fire, which — given that the fire has been able to stretch into the Alpine areas of the hills — had enough height and room to make it across the Fraser River.

Those embers would later set off what’s now dubbed the Ainslie Creek Fire.

As of Tuesday morning, the Coastal Fire Centre seemingly knew that new fire was going to be a problem, as the Wildfire Service indicated on its online update Tuesday morning that Ainslie Creek was going to get its own “incident management” team, suggesting the intention is to treat them as two separate fires.

Screen shot showing heat plumes picked up from the fires in the Fraser Canyon as of Tuesday evening through the EU Copernicus project satellite system/via Windy.com

As of around 7pm on Tuesday evening, the fire plumes provided by Windy.com via the Copernicus Project show a sizeable amount of heat being generated on the east side of the Fraser River — including a number of fires seemingly creeping their way across the Coquihalla Mountains and into Thompson Nicola Regional District territory.

It should be noted that this information is not official, though the Copernicus system utilizes the Sentinel satellite grouping, which has provided the European Union with some of the best satellite data gathered to date.

The intensity of the fire appeared to show itself in an almost apocalyptic darkening of the skies over Kamloops in the late afternoon and early evening, defying all previous smoke modelling.

However, static web cams in the area do show a sudden darkening of the skies in a direct path between the Fraser Canyon and Kamloops over the course of just a few hours, which would indicate a lot of fuel was being burned and taken along with the prevailing winds toward Kamloops and into the North Thompson and Shuswap.

While there have not been any notifications from the BC Wildfire Service of any new communities being threatened by the growing fire, there is a growing possibility that could end up changing by sometime through Wednesday — or earlier.

Right now around 150 homes in the Fraser Canyon area remain under evacuation order, with those living in about 225 other properties are now under official alert — living under the threat of being moved out of their homes.

While the Ainslie Creek fire does appear to be pushing its way back into the sparsely populated areas in between the Fraser Canyon and the Coquihalla Highway north of the Fraser Valley, the smoke born from it is expected to linger in the region for at least the next day or so.

Time-lapsed images showing the Air Quality Index impacts from the fires burning in the Fraser Canyon/via Windy.com

The AQI forecast via Windy.com does suggest the smoke is likely to linger over much of the area from Boston Bar through to Kamloops through most of Wednesday before easing back.