Firefighters recover Grand Canyon mascot Brighty the Burro after wildfire

Missing an ear and his front legs detached, Brighty the Burro certainly has seen better days.

The 600-pound (273-kilogram) bronze statue used to greet visitors at the Grand Canyon Lodge on the national park’s North Rim. The nearly century-old building was reduce to rubble this summer when a wildfire swept through the area. Brighty was found charred, his head and body mostly intact.

As firefighters continued their work Friday to corral the stubborn flames, Brighty hit the road — strapped into the back of a pickup truck for a roughly five-hour journey that would take him from his home on the North Rim to the South Rim.

The plan calls for temporarily housing him in the Grand Canyon National Park’s museum collection so he can be assessed. It will be up to park officials and conservation experts to determine if the burro can be carefully restored or if a new statue will have to be created.

There’s no timeline for the effort, but fans on social media already are weighing in with support for returning the burro to his former glory. They talk about taking family pictures with the sculpture in the background and reading the children’s book that’s loosely based on the original burro’s adventures traversing the canyon.

“It’s a very special symbolic piece of history for a lot of people,” park spokesperson Joëlle Baird told The Associated Press.

An enduring symbol of life along the rugged canyon, the hefty statue represents a free-spirited burro who lived more than a century ago. Brighty was known to migrate up and down the canyon as the seasons changed. He’d help haul water to a summer camp on the North Rim in exchange for pancakes and would give children rides.

One of the first chores for the team will be testing for any toxic materials on the sculpture, Baird said. Then, depending on the damage assessment, the park could end up working with a foundry to make the burro whole again.

Brighty is a small but important part of what will be a yearslong effort for the National Park Service as it charts a path for restoration and reconstruction on the North Rim. More immediately, Baird said a special team that focuses on stabilizing the soil, controlling erosion and reseeding will begin assessing the burned areas starting next week.

The Dragon Bravo Fire was sparked by lightning in early July. It burned for about a week before exploding into a fast moving conflagration that forced evacuations and consumed the Grand Canyon Lodge and dozens of cabins. The National Park Service has defended its handling of the fire, saying a sudden and extreme shift in the wind far exceeded forecasts.

Persistent hot, dry and windy weather has hampered crews over the past several weeks, making it more difficult to fight the flames on the North Rim and elsewhere around the West — from Idaho and Montana to California, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, nearly four dozen large fires are burning in the U.S., with more than 17,700 firefighters and support personnel assigned to them.