Yellow Lake is a pool of stagnant water that sits just below the Duchesne Ridge road in the Uinta mountains. Its principal function is breeding mosquitoes, though local rednecks enjoy mud-bogging their trucks in it. It’s about 100 feet across at high water, and maybe half that this time of year. There is no inlet or outlet.It’s just a low spot that holds the snow melt. I’ve been there often. My father was nostalgic about it. When he was young, they would trail their sheep from Heber, up through the Red Ledges golf course (a waste of good pasture), to their grazing permits at Wolf Creek Pass. They would stop and let the sheep drink from the gross little puddle, rest the horses, and have lunch.It’s at the top of a mountain bike trail that goes through the Mill Hollow YMCA Camp and winds up to the top of the ridge. It’s near where the big fire started. I’m sure there is a formal protocol for naming fires.  They probably go with the nearest mapped and named geologic feature. Nobody is bidding for the naming rights to a forest fire. It’s not much of a lake, and when it was discovered, it wasn’t much of a fire.The fire trucks roared past my house on a Saturday afternoon, so something was clearly up. Sunday afternoon, I was out in the field and suddenly the horizon erupted. The little fire of 24 acres on Saturday was over 150 acres on Sunday, 250 acres by Monday morning, and as of now, two weeks in, 20,000 acres with limited containment.On Friday night a week ago, I stood in the middle of the road in front of my house and looked at the horizon line. The night before, I had been there marveling at the Northern Lights. That night, I was looking at the gates of hell on the eastern horizon. Although several miles away, the flames were visible shooting above horizon. It would have been a glorious sunset, except it was 10 o’clock and 180 degrees away from where the sun had set hours before.I walked back to the house and packed a bag. The fire just kept growing, some days doubling in size, others increasing by only 3,000 acres overnight. Twenty thousand acres is a big patch of real estate. It’s 30 square miles. Picture a strip of land beginning at Kimball Junction and ending at the Salt Lake Airport, a mile wide, all on fire. With only a few access points.I doom scroll the fire all day, checking for updates and downloading apps that will send me alerts if anything changes. I look at the weather forecast constantly. Highway 35 is closed just beyond my house. The only traffic is an odd mix of fire vehicles shuttling firefighters from their base camp in the Francis Town Rodeo Grounds into the thick of the fire, construction vehicles repaving the road, and herds of livestock moving to safer pastures. This time of year, the forest is still filled with livestock on grazing permits. They are supposed to move off about now, so they were being herded down the various side canyons. As best I can tell, there was not a huge barbecue, but there are a fair number of missing cows and sheep. The only thing dumber than one cow is two, but they know enough not to walk into a wall of fire. They could turn up most anywhere — here, Kamas, a golf course in Heber, or down the Duchesne side.  The place was busy with early season hunting, with camps set up everywhere.  Somehow Wasatch Search & Rescue found them. Logging companies had equipment and the summer’s cut of logs right in the thick of it. The extent of their losses is still to be determined.The forest was packed with beetle-killed pine trees that have been standing there, dead as telephone poles, for 15 years or more. There were some young trees and brush filing in, and some green trees that had survived the beetles, but probably had about the same moisture content as a 2×4 from the lumber yard. In other words, a lot of fuel, and unfortunately, a lot of wind to push the fire along. As best I can tell, my neck of the woods is probably out of danger. The community of Hanna, on the other side of the pass, is right in the path if the fire keeps moving down-canyon. They are set to evacuate if the word comes.  There are more than 400 firefighters on it, and enough aircraft that some days it feels like living next to O’Hare Airport. The smoke is choking here, bad through the rest of the county, and showing up as far away as Colorado.  Progress has been painfully slow, and the weather cruelly uncooperative. LDS General Conference came and went without a drop of rain. It’s impossible to hook a hose to the spigot in the Wolf Creek campground and wet down 30 square miles. This is going to burn until there’s nothing left or the snow puts it out. In the thick of all this, my fire insurance policy was up for renewal. The premium went way up, and I asked the agent to shop around. She called and said she had a company that would consider my house with no hydrants deep in the woods, but the skeptical underwriter wanted to come and check it out first. There was ash falling on the hood of my car in the driveway. It seemed like an inopportune time to meet the insurance underwriter, so I shut up and paid the increase.Whether it’s major fires or devastating hurricanes and flooding, Mother Nature is very much in charge of things. And she appears to be angry these days.Stay safe, firefighters. And thanks.Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.The post More Dogs on Main: Living next to the fire appeared first on Park Record.