There are so many wildfires in California and at times northern Nevada. Living in Henderson, I have seen and smelled the smoke from California (once in 2013 I even saw the flames above the mountains). Is southern Nevada in much danger from wildfires and if not, why not?
Yes, you could see the flames in the mountains in 2013, but not from southern California wildfires. What you saw was the Carpenter 1 Fire that roared up Carpenter Canyon on Mount Charleston, 25 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It raged between 5,000 and 10,000 feet in elevation from July 1, when it started near Pahrump, all the way to August 18, when it was finally fully contained after burning 28,000 acres.
This was the largest fire to hit Mount Charleston in many decades and it was considered the number-one-priority fire in the entire nation at the time that it was burning.
More recently, a couple of smaller fires erupted on Potosi Mountain 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas, which you cross on NV 160 on the way to Pahrump. The main fire burned 350 acres on the west (Pahrump) side of the mountain in July of this year.
Lightning strikes are usually the cause of fires in the wooded hills and mountains near Las Vegas. But the city and urban area themselves aren’t nearly as susceptible to wildfires as California or even, for that matter Reno, where more than 100,000 acres of surrounding woodlands burned in July 2017. There simply isn't enough fuel on the desert floor to feed out-of-control wildfires.
The Las Vegas Valley, however, is often hazy and smoky from fires in California, Arizona, and northern Nevada. For example, smoke from a fire around Topaz Lake, 35 miles south of Carson City and nearly 400 miles north of Las Vegas, triggered an air-quality alert in southern Nevada in the summer of 2012. And billowing clouds of smoke settled over Las Vegas Valley from the June 2010 Schultz Fire just north of Flagstaff, Arizona, 250 miles southeast, which burned more than 23 square miles of the San Francisco Mountains.
