Kittitas Co. Emergency Response

Smoke and ash from the Table Mountain Complex wildfire is seen near a firefighters' base camp in eastern Washington.

Crews on Thursday were battling a fire that forced dozens of eastern Washington residents to flee overnight with their valuables. The fire sent pieces of burning bark flying miles away and created columns of smoke nearly eight miles tall, some even reportedly creating their own lightning.

The evacuations in the Mission Ridge area near Wenatchee add to the hundreds of people who earlier evacuated across the region due to fires raging over the last few weeks.

The new evacuations came as eight-inch chunks of burning bark were reported to have fallen in Mission Ridge. Those chunks were coming from an explosive fire inside the Table Mountain Complex some six miles away, a fire incident spokesman said.

That fire, along with others nearby, "have grown rapidly over the last few days, sending large smoke columns with burning embers north and east towards the Mission Ridge area," the incident team said in an update Thursday morning.

Some of those smoke columns topped 40,000 feet on Wednesday, incident spokesman Kent Ramsey told NBC station KING5.com. 

The columns were so hot they generated their own winds, added National Weather Service meteorologist Dan Byrd. "It does create its own little atmosphere," he said, noting that the columns reportedly even created lightning on Wednesday. "We may see that again today," he said.

The region has seen no rain in more than a month, while temperatures have been high and humidity low. Winds have pushed fires into forests with many bug-killed trees that have become easily combustible.

One fire incident commander on Thursday called that combination of conditions so late in September "unprecedented" in his 28 years of firefighting.

In the Mission Ridge area, the residents of some 150 homes were told to evacuate, but some were determined to stay -- at least for now.

The Table Mountain Fire Complex is actually four fires that have so far burned 30,000 acres within the Wenatchee National Forest. The fires, and dozens of others in eastern Washington, were started by lightning strikes earlier this month.

A second Table Mountain fire on Wednesday caused the closure of Highway 97 for several hours. 

The complex of fires was just 4 percent contained on Thursday morning.

Dozens of residents around Liberty, Wash., were earlier told to evacuate.

NASA

This satellite-based image shows major fires burning in Washington state on Wednesday.

In Liberty itself, a town of several dozen, some residents were preparing to leave if an evacuation order is issued there. 

"This time we're watching it pretty close, real close," Larry Smith told KING5.com as he and his wife packed up.

But Paul Heit told KING5.com that he wasn't packing just yet.

"If I see flames coming over the hill and it's coming 80 miles per hour," he said, "yeah, I'll probably leave."

Some 5,000 firefighters are battling the eastern Washington fires, the largest of which is the Wenatchee Complex at nearly 40,000 acres. Nearly 2,000 firefighters have been deployed there but that complex of fires is just 12 percent contained.

The fires have created bad air quality for residents, especially in Wenatchee, Leavenworth and Cashmere, where the school district suspended classes for the week as a result.

Heavy dust has also covered parts of the region. Some locals have even said the conditions are worse than when the Mount St. Helens volcano blew in 1980, sending ash across the state.

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As many as 110 wildfires are burning Monday in central Washington after lightning sparked more blazes over the weekend, just as hundreds were forced to evacuate from a massive wildfire in Idaho.

With no rain expected, a large collection of central Washington fires are charring land in the state's Chelan, Okanogan, Kittitas and Yakima counties, Seattle's NBC-affiliated KING 5 reported. Dozens of homes are threatened by the 6,500-acre Byrd Canyon fire near Entiat, Wash.

To the south, the nearly 500-acre Canyons Fire near Wenatchee, Wash., has burned about 500 acres, while 180 area homes were evacuated, KING 5 reported.

For Wenatchee residents, the wildfires are too close for comfort.

"Inches away from causing me just a lot of heartache and frustration and grief," Wenatchee resident Archie Brown told KING 5.

Elsewhere in Washington state, about 60 homeowners were forced to evacuate because of blazes near the Grand Coulee Dam, KING 5 reported.

Lightning was also to blame in creating 15 new wildfires in Idaho on Sunday, according to The Idaho Statesman.

"Four fires are giving us a little bit of a problem, but the other 11 we’re doing well on," Boise National Forest spokesman David Seesholtz told the Statesman.

Idaho's 408-wquare-mile Mustang Complex fires is still burning after being ignited by lightning in July. Hundreds were evacuated from their homes on Sunday, as the flames came closer to two communities, Reuters reported.

The summer's hot, dry conditions have facilitated prime conditions for wildfires, which have charred more than 7.1 million acres nationwide so far in 2012, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. On Monday, NOAA announced that this summer has been the third hottest on record in the contiguous United States.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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Courtesy of Ramon Rivera

Members of the Wenatchee High School mariachi band get ready to perform at the Washington Apple Blossom Festival in Yakima, Wash., on April 28.

Mariachi is resounding in hundreds of U.S. public schools offering the festive Mexican folk music as part of their band classes, music experts say. Many student musicians will get a chance to show their passion for it at events surrounding Cinco de Mayo on Saturday.

“Its popularity has exploded, and music programs all around the country are bursting with enthusiasm,” said Ramon Rivera, the mariachi program director for the Wenatchee School District in Wenatchee, Wash. His mariachi program boasts 300 students, he says, and draws more young players every year from the community of 30,000 residents in north-central Washington.

Mariachi bands are no longer confined to states along the U.S. border or American cities with growing Hispanic populations, said Daniel Sheehy, a mariachi expert and director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C.

At least 500 U.S. public schools now offer mariachi as part of their music curricula and there are local and state competitions, Sheeny said. He said members at the Music Educators National Conference have created a task force to see how many mariachi programs had taken root in the last five years.

"Mariachi has all the ingredients to make it a powerful movement," Sheeny said. "It’s infectious and honest music and a touchstone of identity." Sheehy has studied the genre for nearly three decades and is the author of "Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture."

Many school bands are gearing up for Cinco de Mayo celebrations. “There is a saying that we live and breathe mariachi in Texas, and that’s no joke,” said Robert Rodriguez, a mariachi director for the Victor Independent School District in Victoria, Texas. “Cinco de Mayo is one of the biggest days for us. We’ll be playing all day long, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.” He said he teaches mariachi to 50 students from the district’s two high schools.

In the Las Vegas area, the Clark County School District's mariachi program has experienced a boom. "We started with four schools and about 250 students in the first year," said Javier Trujillo, who was recruited to help develop the program in southern Nevada in 2002. He said within a decade, the program blossomed to include 15 schools, 16 instructors and 2,500 students. He said he doesn't teach in the schools anymore, but plays in a mariachi band.

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Marcia Neel, who retired this year as coordinator of secondary fine arts for Clark County schools, said Trujillo was being modest about the mariachi program's growth in Las Vegas.

"I would say the numbers of students involved in mariachi is somewhere near 3,000 students," she said. "Mariachi is so popular that I have made it my own personal business, and I have been busy."

She said school districts in Iowa, Tennessee and northern Nevada have invited her to help start mariachi programs at their middle and high schools.

"It is folk music of a country that engages not only the child, but the parent and the entire family," she said. "What is not to love about it?"

The growing number of Mexican-Americans has helped bump up the number of youths interested in the music from their homeland, music instructors say.

But students say it's the beat and the joy of the music that drew them.

"It's my passion, I love it," said Monica Moreno, 14, from Wenatchee High School.

She said she grew up listening to mariachi in her home, where her parents often danced to the music.

"I couldn't stand it," Moreno said. "I hated listening to it while I was growing up. Then everything changed when I watched a performance of mariachi performers at high school. They had passion. They had smiles. They were having fun and that's when I knew I wanted to play in a mariachi band."

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Moreno plays the violin in Wenatchee High School's ninth-grade program.

"I will never stop doing it," she said.

The music of mariachi originated in the state of Jalisco, in Mexico, sometime during the 19th century. While no one knows for sure how mariachi started, the style is certain. Musicians wear elaborate traditional suits of the horseman, traje de charro. Love, betrayal, revolutionary heroes, even animals are common themes of mariachi songs. Common instruments are violins, trumpets, guitars, vihuelas (a five-stringed relative of the guitar), and the guitarrón (a large-bodied acoustic bass).

Megan Howard, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Pioneer Middle School in Wenatchee, says she had always wanted to play guitar but wasn’t interested in classical instruction.

Howard said she first learned how to play mariachi music in fifth grade and now wants to try out for a spot on the high school's mariachi team.

“The music is beautiful, upbeat and fun to play,” said Howard. She said her heart beats along to mariachi.

“Through the music and the musicians I learned about how Mexicans care [about] their land,” she said. “I’ve learned not only to play, but learned to appreciate things that are important in life. Mariachi has changed my life.”

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