1984 - Revisiting a bad fire year

Hopefully we have seen the last of this year's record breaking wild blazes on public and private lands. Am recalling just one other year like this for old time's sake. Since writing the following almost exactly 31  years ago, there have been other years worse, like 2003. The future depends on better proactive government forest management. Fewer lawsuits, less bureaucratic nonsense, and a couple of Central American kids, El Nino and El Nina. Now! Back to 8/29/84:

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Forest fires rage across our state as I write this week's column. CBS news tonight said "85,000 acres were burning out of control in Montana." At least four of the bad ones are near Kalispell.

I fought my first forest fire at age 16, during World War II, and later spent nine summers as a professional in that line of work, battling blazes of every kind from New Mexico to Canada. I lost a few friends to forest fires and have had my own moments of special terror. In the main, serious fire fighting is terribly hard work for the conscientious, and ironically, big fires often attract some people who don't want to work at all.

Maybe a few forest fire anecdotes and observations will fit with this week's news.

It is a known fact many fires during the Great Depression were fought during the day, and then "helped" over the lines at night. I even saw a few in the '40s and '50s. There isn't much of that nowadays, but it still happens.

During the 1967 fire on Huckleberry Mountain and Camas Creek in Glacier Park, numerous grizzly bears began patrolling the fire lines at night. They were attracted there by lunches being tossed into the brush by the Eskimo crew, which had been flown down from Alaska. There are apparently things an Eskimo will not eat, but there isn't much a grizzly won't.

Hot, running fires can create their own winds. They can also create a curtain of explosive and deadly gasses out ahead of the flame front. They can propel large pieces of burning fuels considerable distances down wind, i.e., ahead of themselves. Under rare conditions they can also burn through an area twice in a "reburn." They may jump wide rivers and highways, and other times be stopped by a foot wide line to mineral soil.

Other than fire in dense dry grass, the fastest fires I ever saw were ones, which "crowned out" in heavy growths of dense timber. My crew on the Pony Peak fire in northern California, about 1951, barely escaped from such a fire by racing it to the Klamath River. We just made it, with a good head start. No man or beast can outrun a fire that really takes off.

On the dangerous 1953 Helen Creek fire in the Bob Marshall wilderness my crew stopped the main point with eight smokejumpers and two volunteer civilians. Our relief crew for "mop up," was the contents of the Great Falls jail. The home for elderly widows would have produced more help than those guys. Looking back, I wished I'd let that one get away. It was in a good place to produce badly needed winter range for deer and elk. Instead, I got a Forest Service commendation and Helen Creek remained a dense, unproductive and choked up mess. (Note: maybe that area burned this summer.)

The earth was created in fire and is maintained by fire. Man's homes are heated and cooled by fire. His tools, clothing, and food are byproducts of fire. Like the water and ice that sustains life, fire is a fundamental necessity that sometimes goes beyond man's control.

The only sure end to the fires of '84 will come from the same forces that created them. Thousands of sweating little humans do some good, dozens of bulldozers and aircraft are better, but nothing beats a good rain or snow to get things back into balance.

And that my friends ... is the way it looks from here.

Postscript:

This column was written when I had no grandchildren. This past week in 2015, one of my grandsons, Parker Duncan, finished up his second year on a wildfire Hotshot team that fought fires from Alaska, to Washington, Idaho, and the final weeks in California. He thought it was often a very tough job. He can't say his grandpa didn't warn him.

G. George Ostrom is a national award-winning columnist for Hungry Horse News. He lives in Kalispell.