As of Wednesday morning, the Lee Fire was 68% contained at 137,755 acres, according to the Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team. This is up 8% from Tuesday morning, even with hot and dry conditions producing smoke from hot spots within the fire.

Firefighters on Tuesday began disassembling and removing unnecessary supplies. Also on Tuesday, the team focused on evaluating structure protection needs in unaffected areas.

The Lee Fire, near the town of Meeker in Rio Blanco County, has grown to be the fifth-largest wildfire in Colorado history. In general, the scale of the firefighting effort has gone down as risk has continued to decrease. Compared to just over 700 personnel on Tuesday, there were 523 total people on the firefighting crew as of Wednesday.

Additionally, evacuation zone 65 was downgraded from “Go” status to “Set” status at around 11 a.m. Wednesday.

Crews on Wednesday planned on cleaning up several pockets of unburned fuel, patrolling the fire perimeter and increasing debris clean-up debris along the fire lines. This will create a more uniform footprint of burned areas.

Visible smoke columns will continue to be produced from active fire behavior in unburned sections as record temperatures are expected for the rest of the week. Moisture chances increase each day with rainfall possible over the weekend and at the beginning of next week. A chance of high winds and lightning also remains in the forecast over the next few days.