After burning for two months and threatening at times to reach Sunriver and La Pine, the eastern flank of the Cedar Creek Fire is no longer considered a threat, according to Chris Orr, the incident commander trainee of Northwest Incident Team 7, which is part of the firefighting effort.

“It would take a significant event to cause the east (side of the fire) to move, which is a very low probability at this time of year,” said Orr.

As of Friday, the fire had burned 120,546 acres of land in the Deschutes and Willamette national forests, largely in remote areas far from human habitation. No structures have burned in the fire, which is now 27% contained and has so far run up a tab of $100 million in firefighting costs.

Kurt Stich, a division supervisor for Northwest Incident Team 7, said the fire naturally died down as a result of cool and wet weather.

“It was weather dependent. We came on seven days ago, and from that point forward we had significant rainfall enough to moderate fire, put the thing down a little bit so the intensity wasn’t quite so bad,” said Stich, a veteran firefighter with 30 years experience. “There hasn’t been a great deal of movement since our team’s arrival because of weather.”

On the eastern flank of the fire, crews did not engage with the blaze head-on, instead choosing to create fire breaks to “box in” the wildfire if it continued to spread. Joyce El Kouarti, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Forest Service, said it didn’t make sense to attack the fire directly.

“The terrain is too rugged. It’s too steep. There are too many difficult slopes. It would endanger the firefighters’ lives, and it would only be a 50-50 chance of success,” she said. “We are not going to fight fire where we don’t believe we can be successful. That is why we had a strategy of pulling back to a line where we felt we could be successful.”

Earlier management teams decided to fight the eastern flank indirectly by building a 52-mile-long shaded fire break along the Cascades Lakes Highway. Stich said there is still work to be done on cleaning up the debris in the fire break. Over the past week, he said 150 trucks loaded with ground-up wood are hauled away each day.

The work is winding down, and crews are being slowly shipped out. More than 1,200 personnel are still working on the fire, down from a peak of 2,400 in mid-September.

“There is work to be accomplished. We’re segmenting that work out so we can slowly process the crews out and send them to their respective homes,” said Stich.