Our Trial By Fire

Beset by heat and drought, the West burns up

This was a record fire year in the West, but most are these days. Wildfire began on schedule in the Southwest, but by July the heavy action was in the northern Rockies. Forest fires roared across more than 600,000 acres of Montana, where I live, close to 30 major fires, some lasting from mid-June until first snowfall in October. Idaho had it worse, with roughly the same number of fires as Montana but more than two million acres burned. The two states took the brunt of the action but were not far out of line with the rest of the West. All told, as much as eight million acres of western wildlands burned (the same as in each of the past three years); the climax came in Southern California with brushfires that claimed almost 2,000 homes and at least seven lives, engulfing close to half a million acres in less than a week.

More than 20 years ago, creditable science warned us that the American West would face a conflagration unless we reversed a policy on forest fires that left forests choked with fuels, and unless we reversed global warming. Instead, this nation bickered away those 20 years. Perhaps we wouldn't have had we known that global warming means being endlessly anxious and frightened, living in a soup of smoke for months on end, bristling at every change of wind that might blow the whole business up into a firestorm capable of inhaling entire towns in minutes.

Even before this record season, a group of researchers writing in Science linked the worsening fires to global warming. They found that "since 1986, longer, warmer summers have resulted in a fourfold increase in major wildfires and a sixfold increase in the area of forest burned, compared to the period from 1970 to 1986."

In the West, fire is a keystone issue, in the same sense that there are keystone species in ecosystems. I have used its power to unravel mysteries of nature and, increasingly, human nature for more than 20 years, my knowledge tempered by a particular fire. All of us who think about fire can cite a moment of conversion, a fire that surpasses all expectations, that makes one unlearn everything taught by precedent, that irrevocably changes the way one views the natural world. Personally experiencing such a fire is the only way to begin to comprehend the scale of what we face today.

My own conversion by fire came in 1989, in Canyon Creek.

That fire had burned the previous summer toward the southern end of Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness. The Forest Service decided then to let it burn as part of a newly minted and largely untried policy that recognized fire's regenerative role in Rocky Mountain forests. So this fire fizzled and popped around a few thousand acres through July and August, largely unnoticed in what was rapidly building as a record fire year. I was one of the un-noticers then, a newspaper reporter charged with covering Montana's fires, and there were bigger fish frying. That was the year of Yellowstone National Park's spectacular self-immolation, and Yellowstone was getting all the press.

Nonetheless, a perfect storm came on the evening of September 6. The jet stream dropped very close to ground level and slammed gale-force winds straight into the face of the Canyon Creek fire, driving it east across 40 miles of timber in a single night, spilling it out onto the plains near Augusta. No recorded fire had ever run that far, that quickly. In a matter of hours, it grew from a few thousand to 250,000 acres--in an era when a big blaze was 10,000 acres.

I call it my fire to this day, but it was, in fact, Orville Daniels's fire. He was the supervisor of the Lolo National Forest, which includes the part of the Bob Marshall where it began, and it was he who made the decision on July 1 to let it burn. Thus his name became an epithet among the ranchers and residents of mountain towns that were threatened by his escaped fire. The smoke plume was visible from the windows of the governor's mansion in Helena, about 50 miles to the southeast.

The Forest Service reacted to the resulting political inferno by rushing out a video spinning the agency's take on the story. Daniels went on camera and said his decision had been sound when he made it but seemed a blunder in retrospect. So what does he say in light of today's conflagrations and 19 years of subsequent experience with wilderness fire?

"I said it was a good decision at the time I made it," says Daniels, now retired, "but circumstances changed. If I look back now, though, it was an even better decision than I thought. It has proven to be a very, very valuable fire."

There were three big fires in the Bob Marshall Wilderness complex this year, including one called Conger Creek, which burned inside the perimeter of the 1988 fire. The Forest Service more or less ignored Conger Creek and spent a mere $900,000 herding it a bit. Despite the lack of attention, it grew to only 25,000 acres, simply because the Canyon Creek fire had eaten so much fuel 19 years ago. Meantime, the agency actively fought the two other fires, Ahorn and Fool Creek, both in areas that had not burned in 1988, and spent $25 million doing so. Notwithstanding those efforts, the two fires grew to 52,000 and 60,000 acres, respectively. So arguably, Canyon Creek was "valuable" to the tune of more than $24 million, the payoff from fighting fire with fire 19 years ago.

Continued...