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Somewhere west of the Sooke River this week, on the slopes of a modest mountain most people outside the Capital Region couldn’t point to on a map, a wildfire has been doing what wildfires do in a dry September: growing when nobody’s looking.
The Mount Jack wildfire was first spotted the afternoon of Sunday, September 20, 2026, about four kilometres west of the Sooke River on southern Vancouver Island, according to the BC Wildfire Service. By early Monday afternoon it was a modest 12 hectares — the kind of number that, on this coast, doesn’t necessarily make anyone put down their coffee. By Tuesday morning it had grown to 50.4 hectares. By 1:23 p.m. Tuesday, September 22, it had doubled again, past 100 hectares, according to CHEK News, which cited the wildfire service’s own figures.
Now, if you’ve spent any time out past Sooke, you know the country: steep, forested, the kind of terrain where a fire can lean into a slope and pick up speed nobody planned for. The wildfire service says that’s exactly what happened — the fire moving laterally across the face of Mount Jack, fed by the same warm, dry stretch that’s been leaning on the whole south Island for weeks.
Erika Berg of the Coastal Fire Centre offered a bit of hope in comments carried by CHEK News on September 22: “We’re seeing that fire behavior lessening because it’s starting to reach now the north face of the slope, where the impact of heat and wind is less.” It’s the kind of small mercy a fire crew takes gladly — a hillside itself doing a bit of the work.
Here’s the part that matters most if you’re reading this from Victoria, Colwood, or points up-Island: as of Tuesday afternoon, the BC Wildfire Service says the fire poses no threat to public safety or critical infrastructure, and no evacuation orders or alerts have been issued. Global News, citing the same service, reported the wildfire service’s own assessment that the blaze “did not currently pose a threat to public safety nor critical infrastructure” — though it cautioned that further growth could be expected given the conditions.
What you will notice, if you step outside anywhere from Greater Victoria up to Shawnigan Lake and the South Cowichan Valley, is the smoke. The wildfire service says the column has been highly visible, and crews — helped by bucketing helicopters, heavy equipment, and existing roads used as fuel breaks — have been working it from the air and the ground both. Anyone with breathing concerns is being pointed, as always in a summer like this one, to HealthLinkBC for guidance on smoke exposure.
The BC Wildfire Service says the cause is believed to be human activity, still under investigation as of this week.
Zoom out and Mount Jack is one note in a long, dry season. Provincial figures reported this week put well over 100 wildfires burning across British Columbia, several of them still out of control, with drought conditions across Vancouver Island keeping crews busy through what’s usually the tail end of fire season. The good news, such as it is: forecasters and the wildfire service both point to cooler temperatures and a chance of rain later this week, which crews are counting on to do what hoses alone sometimes can’t.
Nobody out past Sooke is packing a bag tonight. But if you can see the smoke from your porch, you already knew that this dry summer wasn’t quite ready to let go of the coast just yet.
