Whitefish Ranging

Over the weekend the boy and I headed up the North Fork. The plan was to go to Thoma Lookout and take a look-see at the Weasel Fire, which burned into Canada along the border last week.

The Weasel Fire would have to do quite a bit of twisting around to really harm anything but trees. The southwest prevailing winds are sure to push it even farther into Canada and it would need a big east wind to push it deeper into the U.S. and Trail Creek, where homes are.

Stranger things have happened, of course.

But the trip was more for exercise than anything else. I haven’t been to Thoma Lookout in years, about 10 of them, give or take, so I forgot, exactly, how to get there.

To make a long story short, I drove by the trailhead to the lookout and went up Road 114A where I found the Thoma-Tuhuck Trail, which, I assumed, went to the lookout.

Nothing looked familiar, however and we thought about turning around at the 10-minute mark, but then figured the worst that could happen would be I would end up on a ridge or mountain somewhere way up in the Whitefish Range, which is exactly what happened.

The trail was pretty relentlessly straight up, but interesting in that it had a lot of healthy whitebark pine and plenty of alpine larch as well.

Once we broke out of treeline we gained a ridge and right below us was (drumroll please) the Weasel Fire.

The fire was skunking along about 3/4-mile or so away to the north. It was about noon or thereabouts. It was a waterless, hot, dry, hike and even though I brought well over a gallon of water, some snowfields on a ridge about a mile away looked inviting, so we hiked over to them and filled the water bottles with snow on top of the warm water.

It made for refreshing drink.

After that we gained a ridge and then scrambled up a small treeless knob of rock where we could look at the fire.

A pika called in the rocks, which I didn’t expect.

While the trail is waterless, the area itself is not. There were several small ponds below us, but getting to them looked like no fun. It seemed odd that the trail didn’t swing around to at least one of them on the way up, but then again, I didn’t cut the trail.

By then the Weasel Fire was beginning to cook up pretty good and we watched it consume a distant hillside, presumably in Canada.

Having said that, I still don’t think the fire has much growth potential. For one, it looks like it’s going to burn into some clearcuts and secondly, the Canadian Flathead has fewer trees and way more rock than the U.S. Flathead.

Still, it will probably be around until we see a significant rain, which could take weeks.

It turned out the trail we were on went to the top of Tuchuck Mountain.

We didn’t go to the end of it, because I wanted to be home before dark, though there was some inviting snow up there, too.

The Forest Service has since closed the area we were in down, but the trail to Thoma Lookout remained open as of presstime.