Trip Report - Fighting a Montana Wildfire

[Fishwhenican]

Last wednesday night we had a major windstorm/lightening storm come through and it started several fires by us.

One of the fires was very close to the St Labre Mission where I work. I am on the fire department there and we were called out to work on the fire that evening. It was "put out and under control" by 2:00am Thursday morning.

At about 11:30 Thursday morning we noticed smoke from the fire flaring up. Myself and two other people got changed into our wildland fire fighting gear and went to take a look and it got crazy from there! The fire had flared up and we had 35 mph winds on the way.

To make a very long story shorter the fire jumped out of control very quickly. It ran out of control and along with the Ashland Volunteer FD, BIA firefighters, Northern Cheyenne FD (It actually started on the reservation), forest service firefighters and many of our maintenance staff we managed to save a lot of houses that by all rights should have been burned down. We also had air support from a large "Heavy" bomber and a SEAT aircraft dropping retardant and a helicopter dropping water as well. It was a miracle that some of the houses involved survived. The fire at several times was burning on the mission grounds and we managed to keep it away from buildings and homes. It eventually destroyed several homes in an area right across the road from the mission and got into a sawdust pile at an abandoned lumberyard that is still burning. The entire town was at risk if the fire had advanced much further than it did when we stopped it.

There were a couple of times that I was sincerely scared by a wall of flame coming at us (being pushed by 30+ mph winds) with only a dozer line and a waterhose to try and stop it. At one point we had to make a wild run to escape a wall of flames that was at least 15' high roaring at us just on the other side of the dozer line from us. The word "intense" does not do that one justice.

Here is a picture of the fire as it approached our mission property. It eventually jumped the road and started the field here on fire and burned to within 20 yards of our Daycare building where we managed to get it stopped.



The fires here are very very bad this year! Right now Montana has over 250,000 acres burning or burned. There is a fire on forest service land right now that is about 10 miles from my house at has grown to over 13,000 acres. I do not think it will get to the point where it will be a problem for us but you never know with the crazy weather we can have around here!