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RacketCast Ep. 57: Understanding MN Wildfires Feat. Fire Behavior Analyst Art Gonzales

What makes fires tick?

1:49 PM CDT on July 24, 2026

Grand Lake Fire earlier this month near Hermantown.

|Instagram: GrandLakeFireMN

All month long wildfires have wreaked havoc in northern Minnesota. The Boundary Waters are shut down until October, tourist-starved Ely businesses are trying to stay afloat, and the smoldering could last well into winter.

To better understand the fiery situation we booked Art Gonzales, a fire behavior analyst with the Southern Area Complex Incident Management Team. A former fire fighter himself, he now studies and tracks wildfires around the country to help teams extinguish them. Gonzales has been doing just that up in Ely, and we stole some of his valuable time to get a crash-course on how Minnesota's wildfires are, well, behaving.

Before any of that, Em and Jay get into a red-hot round of What I Learned in Racket. Here's what they learned...

Subscribe to RacketCast wherever you get your podcasts—Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, etc. • Wanna advertise on RacketCast? Email us at advertise@racketmn.com. • Have a food/drink, event, or show recommendation? How about a civic hot take? General or specific question? Call 619-RACKTIP (619-722-5847) with your first name + city + 3-min.-maximum voicemail, and we might play it on a future episode. • Special thanks to local band Van Stee for supplying our podcast music!

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