Thursday, September 24, 2026 / Nimrod / McKenzie River corridor / East Lane
East Lane's new fire scout can find heat in the dark
A Nimrod-based Skydio X10 has already mapped wildfire edges after crewed aircraft stopped flying and hunted for hotspots that looked cold from the ground.
A lightning strike south of Belknap Resort once went from flash to coordinates in three or four minutes. About 20 minutes later, local and Forest Service engines were at the spot. That is the job East Lane's new wildfire drone is built to repeat.
Oregon Department of Forestry's South Cascade East Lane unit is operating a Skydio X10 from Nimrod. Unlike the foreign-built drone it replaces, the new aircraft meets federal procurement requirements and has been inspected for U.S. Forest Service work, so it can cross the jurisdictional seams that appear on multi-agency fires.
The drone carries infrared, telephoto, zoom and wide-angle cameras. This season it mapped residual heat near Dorena and flew twice over the East Evans Creek Fire at night, tracing the fire edge while crewed aircraft were generally grounded. Its imagery can be stitched into a georeferenced map that sends crews toward specific hotspots instead of asking them to search a burned landscape by feel.
Local lightning has mostly arrived with rain this season, so East Lane has not needed a detection mission yet. The aircraft's other work is already demonstrating the point: an eye in the sky matters when it can hand someone on the ground a place to go.
Field notes
What changed: ODF's East Lane unit added a federally compatible thermal-imaging drone based in Nimrod and has already used it on 2026 fires.
Why it matters: The aircraft can find heat, map fire movement after dark and work across state, federal and mixed-ownership incidents.
Who may be affected: East Lane communities, wildland firefighters and residents near multi-agency fire incidents.