The fire burned through pine trees,[5] sagebrush, timber in the understory, grass, and various riparian areas.

[4] The fire coated the resort areas of Hailey, Ketchum, and Sun Valley, in a layer of thick soot and ash.

[5] By the time the fire was fully contained on August 31, 114,900 acres of the Ketchum Ranger District of Sawtooth National Forest has been burned.

The threat to the Sun Valley area by these fires, which both started upwind of the resort was not at first recognized to be serious.

[8] Large fires that burn many acres usually occur in hot, dry temperatures where there is intense build-up of vegetation.

With the combination of weather, fuel, and topography that the Beaver Creek Fire took place in, it was hard to stop.

Not until humidity increased, some rainstorms began to take place, and cloud cover appeared in the area was the Beaver Creek Fire able to be drastically slowed and contained.

[12] An example of an invasive species in the area of the Beaver Creek Fire is cheat grass, Bromus tectorum.

The area of the Beaver Creek Fire is known to be infested with Mountain Pine Beetles, Dendroctonus ponderosae.

[10] The more trees the Mountain Pine Beetle kills, the more large woody fuel falls to the ground causing increased fire intensity and severity.

Animals have internal mechanisms that cause them to reproduce around the fire disturbance regime, this is called reproductive timing.

[16] If no fire occurs for an extended period of time, plants can begin to crowd out new plant growth, such as sagebrush and grasses in the Beaver Creek Fire area, and cause habitat loss, for birds such as sage grouse.

These types of fires usually produce a "mosaic pattern", not all trees and vegetation is burned, so that there is a good mixture between new growth and fully matured plants.

[2] Firefighters even used the paths of past wildfires to help slow down the Beaver Creek Fire.

This allowed the area more financial funds to fight the fire and more human resources, such as firefighters.

The Beaver Creek Fire, first and foremost, gave new vegetation more room to grow and more access to sunlight for new trees.

Many of the small burrowing mammals in the area probably could not survive the intense heat of the Beaver Creek Fire, or the smoke, and died.

The resulting inability to absorb or percolate rainfall created dramatically altered drainage patterns.

Very substantial rains in late August and early September 2013 caused a large number of debris flows down the hillsides and flooding in the Greenhorn area, resulting in serious damage to homes, roads and topography.

The BAER team conducts rapid assessments of watersheds with analyses of the fire affected area conducted by civil engineers and multi-discipline scientific specialists, such as soil scientists, hydrologists, geologists, biologists, botanists, silviculturists, and archeologists.

The goal is for erosion control to be implemented before the first big rainfall to, hopefully, stop mudslides from burying roads and private property.

[22] Other plans for recovery include placing straw waddles down as erosion barriers, using bulldozers for reseeding, aerial dropping straw and mulch on intensely burned hillsides for drainage purposes, using log stabilizers to stop erosion, cleaning out and removing some culverts on the roads and adding over 1,000 new drainage structures to the trails impacted by the fire.