Fire center: Northern Rockies face big fire year

The northwestern United States enter wildfire season with drier-than-normal conditions following a mild winter that left little snow.

Robyn Heffernan, a deputy fire weather program manager at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, blames the El Nino weather pattern that suggests higher-than-normal fire wildfire potential for the northern Rocky Mountain states.

That includes Montana, Idaho, parts of eastern Washington, …