Sunday, Kittitas County sheriff's deputies began going door to door in the northern Cle Elum Valley, telling roughly a dozen residents to leave immediately.
Overnight, conditions worsened enough that deputies upgraded the order to Level 3 at 9:30 a.m.
Unmanned aircraft systems were deployed Sunday to assess the fire's size and search the surrounding timber for new ignitions, according to MyNorthwest , a reliance on aerial surveillance that tracks with how thin the valley's ground crews already were, split as they were between two other active fires.
11 at Cle Elum High School to brief residents directly, a step often reserved for fires expected to threaten inhabited areas over an extended period rather than a short-lived initial-attack response.
Level 2, "Get Set," means residents should be packed and ready to leave at a moment's notice.
A new Goat Fire triggered Level 3 evacuations in Kittitas County's Cle Elum Valley Sunday, adding a third active wildfire to a stretch of the Cascades already fighting the Three Queens and King fires.