A wildfire is burning in heavy redwood timber on the Sonoma coast, with Highway 1 closed and one zone under evacuation order. It is some 53 miles from Kenwood — but its smoke is not: air quality across the region reached “very unhealthy” on Friday.
This report reflects official information as of Friday, July 31st, around 9:15 a.m. An active fire changes by the hour. For live information use CAL FIRE’s incident page, SoCoEmergency and Watch Duty. If you are in or near an evacuation zone, follow the Sheriff’s Office, not this newspaper.
The Woodside Fire started on Thursday afternoon, July 30th, in the 24000 block of Highway 1 near Timber Cove, on the west side of the highway inside Salt Point State Park. CAL FIRE put it at 142.6 acres and 30% contained in its Friday morning update, up from roughly 100 acres when the first evacuation order went out the previous afternoon. Crews gained ground overnight; the containment figure moved from nothing to 30% between Thursday evening and Friday morning.
It is burning in heavy timber, redwood among it — fuel that holds fire longer than the grass and brush that carries most of the valley’s summer starts. Northwesterly winds of 10 to 15 miles an hour, gusting to about 25, pushed the head of the fire southeast on Thursday. No cause has been announced.
Evacuations and closures
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office issued an evacuation order for zone SON-1D1 at about 4 p.m. on Thursday — the coastal strip between Fort Ross and the north end of Salt Point, taking in Timber Cove, Walsh Landing, Seaview and Stump Beach, some 350 households. An evacuation warning covers the neighbouring inland zone SON-1D2, about 265 households. The Woodside and Gerstle Cove campgrounds inside Salt Point State Park were cleared.
Highway 1 is closed between Stewarts Point Skaggs Springs Road and Timber Cove Road — a long detour on a coast where there is no parallel route. A temporary evacuation point was opened at Laguna High School, 7050 Covey Road, Forestville.
Neither CAL FIRE nor local coverage had reported any injuries or destroyed structures as of Friday morning. That is an absence of reports rather than an all-clear, and early figures on any fire are provisional.
What it means here
Very little, directly. Salt Point is about 53 miles from Kenwood in a straight line, 56 from Glen Ellen and 49 from Oakmont, with the whole of the coast range in between. There is no evacuation zone within many miles of the three towns, and no red flag warning is in effect for Sonoma County.
The air is another matter entirely, and it is the reason this coastal fire matters inland. The Bay Area Air District’s monitor at Santa Rosa — nine miles from Kenwood, the nearest official station to the valley — recorded fine-particulate air quality of AQI 211 on Friday, which is the “very unhealthy” band. It read 165, “unhealthy”, on Thursday. Sonoma County’s health officer has issued an air quality advisory warning that parts of the county may see “very unhealthy” or “hazardous” conditions.
The official forecast has Saturday at AQI 152, still “unhealthy”, before conditions ease to moderate on Sunday and Monday and back to good by Tuesday. In plain terms: this weekend is the bad part, and it should be over by the start of next week.
A correction, and a caution about numbers. An earlier version of this report put the valley’s air at around AQI 50 and said healthy people would notice nothing. That was wrong, and we have replaced it. Those figures came from a gridded forecast model which, we discovered while reporting the follow-up, was not resolving the smoke plume at all — it returned nearly identical readings for the whole county, including at the fire itself. The numbers above now come from the Bay Area Air District’s actual monitors. There is still no ground-level monitor in Sonoma Valley proper, so Santa Rosa is the closest real reading we have. If you can smell smoke, believe your nose.
With air in this range the county’s guidance is to stay indoors with windows and doors shut, set air conditioning and car ventilation to recirculate, keep the fresh-air intake closed, stay hydrated, and avoid anything that adds smoke or dust — no mowing, no leaf blowing, no barbecuing, no wood fires. Older adults, pregnant women, children and anyone with heart or lung conditions are the most affected. A cloth or surgical mask does little against fine particulates; an N95 or P100, well fitted, does.
Where to get real-time information
CAL FIRE incident page for acreage, containment and official updates. SoCoEmergency for evacuation zones and shelters. SoCoAlert for warnings to your phone — if you have not registered, it takes five minutes and this is the week to do it. Watch Duty, free and run by volunteers with scanner access, remains the fastest source most people in this county actually use. Our own fire, weather and water dashboard carries live air quality, the fire-weather forecast and burn status for the valley, refreshed through the day.
Sources: CAL FIRE incident data, retrieved 31 July 2026; Sonoma County SoCoEmergency; reporting by the Sonoma Index-Tribune and the Press Democrat on the evacuation zones and highway closure; air-quality readings from the Open-Meteo air quality service; distances calculated from published coordinates.