Red Skies over Montana

“If the winds kick up (and they're starting to today) Montana could have a repeat of the 1910 fires that burned pretty much all of the Northern Rockies. We awoke in Billings this morning to a red ball of a sunrise and choking smoke and we're a ways from the main fire complexes. Missoula is pretty much surrounded by large fires and the residents can't stay outside very long without choking. There are several bad ones west of here along I-90 as well as the Beartooth Mtns.

Here's a map of the main fire complexes in the west. It's kind of interesting; you can go over to the Printable Fire Maps or the Satelite Fire imagery.”

“Wow, AEro. Your part of the map has more red dots than a teenager's face! But, seriously, pulling for rain for you guys and I hope the situation quiets ASAP...”

“Wow. I knew it was bad, but that gives me a different perspective.”

“WOW, that's a lot of fires. are you scared, Aero? if so, you can always come live with me. i'll hide you in the closet! LOL!”

“WOW! Didn't realize it was that bad.

CUM ON RAIN!”

“We've had the driest July since 1937 and the second driest ever recorded; only a trace since mid-June or so. With low humidity, heat and wind those forests are tinderboxes!”

“For all the TT'ers out that way...

Please stay safe and sound!

I wish good thoughts for you all and hope that not only are you and your families and friends stay safe - but that your homes do so too.

Time for a gas mask?”

“The 9/11 firefighters from NYC came out to study the Incident Command Centers the wildland firefighters use. They had never seen anything like it when these guys came to Ground Zero and set up a long-term camp. Most of the fires in the city never lasted more than 24 hours so the wildland firefighters set up long-term command centers after 9/11. It's kind of a cool story.”

“Wow, Aero, I just looked at that map! Has anyone heard from Newgirl lately, and if she's ok?”

“She lives about a mile from me and as long as she waters the lawn she'll be OK.

It has been so smokey around the area that people's smoke alarms have been going off!

Billings isn't in any danger, but the rural areas are still highly vulnerable (flamable)!”

“I just read that article. It was very interesting. The help that our city received was invaluable, I know. But, I never thought in terms of the different strategies needed to battle the problems that were at hand. Thanks for sharing that...”

“No kidding we're choking!!!! I woke up at 6AM and thought the freakin' fires had finally hit the outskirts of the city. There was even a haze inside my apt.

Interesting tidbit: Kiln dried lumber has something like 12% moisture. LAST summer (when I still worked at the sawmill) our logger quit logging for several wks. He told the boss, "Some of that timber I'm falling is drier than kiln dried. I don't want to start a fire w/ a simple spark from my equipment." And to think . . . that was LAST summer. Skeery!

My buds in Missoula reported that today they are only going outside w/ damp towels to breath through.”

“I talked to a girl in Missoula the other day and she said she hasn't been able to run outside for the past week; it's too smokey and it just burns your eyes and lungs. Everybody's staying inside like when Mt. St. Helens erupted! I predict a baby boom over there in May 2004!

Newgirl- the smoke woke me up this morning too. I thought the house was on fire! We had the windows wide open last night and it really blew in this morning.”

“Stay well guys! We need a line of TTers starting at Lake Michigan filling up their Nalgene bottles and passing them down the line to the good, dry people of Montana.”

“Same here Aero! I had a horrible headache and then I realized how thick the smell of the smoke was in the house. I got up and started shutting windows, when I looked outside I could hardly believe all the smoke. It brings back alot of memories for me of when our house burned down in the '84 fire in the Bulls.”

“Wounded, I read somewhere that some of the fire bosses basically feel that it is going to take a heavy, wet, early Sept. snow for these fires. They need Lake Michigan, and then some!”

“Lake Superior is closer, but of course, we can only take water out of the U.S. half.”

“I don't doubt it. What you guys need is some of the rain we received here in Chicago this year. To bad we cannot export it to you guys.”

“Hey, Aero, did you see the suppression costs in the paper? And we thought we had a state budget problem . . .”

“The snow was the only thing that stopped the Yellowstone fires in 1988. They were out of control until the snow hit in mid-September. The week's forecast dosen't look too promising; more dry, hot weather with a chance of thundershowers, which means little rain and lots of lightning!”

“Yeah, the cost is mind-boggling! If it weren't for the structures, they should just let it burn. They may have no choice soon.”

“How are you going to train your runners Aero? They're going to need gas masks.”

“As far as some of the structures go (like personal homes), I know personally it sucks big, hairy ones to lose your home in a forest fire. However, if you build it there, you take the risk. In some cases I think they just need to let it burn, even when it threatens homes. Evacuate people and let 'er rip!”

“We start on Monday and I'm not sure how we'll handle it yet. The Univ. Montana football team moved over to Butte for pre-season practice, but it's not much better over there. We're supposed to train in the Beartooths at the end of next week, although I don't think it's as bad over at Cooke(d) City.”

“We need to let nature do her job and clean up the forests. If there wasn't some damn much fuel on the ground, we wouldn't have so serious a fire season to begin w/.”

“You're a voice of reason, Newgirl! I agree, but it's been turned into a politcal battle. Sheesh!@”

“Yeah, I heard the Griz headed to Butte. I have fam and friends there too though and they seemed to think it was a useless move. What Park enterance is closed anyway? Was it the E. one?”

“Okay, I gotta ask a stupid question.

Since the stuff is gonna burn anyway, why not just log it and use it, instead of letting it go to waste? I realize there is some intrinsic value in letting the timber burn, that is, it's part of the forest cycle and all that, is it just a human conceit that burning is natural and therefore good, and logging is unnatural and therefore bad?”

“I'm no expert by any means, but I think the danger lies alot in the ground cover and newer growth, not the trees that are actually big enough to log. The fire can spread due to all the stuff close to the ground. That's why some people argue that logging doesn't really help prevent wildfires.
At any rate, those smokejumpers and other firefighters out west are real heroes. I hope they and their families are well taken care of.”

“Bit, Aero can probably add alot to this, but I pretty much agree w/ what you are saying . . . w/in reason. Some loggers are not good stewards of the forest and have little respect for the impact they have there. Often, their poor practices can add to fire risk and timber is lost before it can be cut anyway.
However, some loggers are well trained and careful. They know what timber to take and what timber to leave. They know how to limit their impact as far as affecting streams, building rds. etc. They know when they might be contributing to fire risk (like the logger at the sawmill I worked at). He understood that if he started a fire, it was going to burn acres and acres and acres of valuable timber that my boss had purchased and planned to carefully harvest for several yrs. Loggers and mill operates are putting their own interests in mind if they are good stewards, taking only what they need and through that, making way for the new growth which keeps their lively hood a viable option.”

“Stickman has a good point too. When loggers get done in an area they have what are called "slash" piles left over. It is the tree limbs cut off the trees after they go through the de-limber. It is important that they clean up slash and don't leave it there to further contribute to the mess on the floors of much of MT's forest. A mess that is there, because of the fire suppression policies which keep it building up instead of burning up (natural process of self-cleaning for the the forest).”

“Right, within reason. I wasn't asking why we shouldn't clearcut entire forests. That's obviously bad. And I wasn't implying that cutting the forest would save it from a fire. I'm asking why we should let the resource go to waste simply because some interests believe that's "better" somehow.

If all loggers were as responsible as the one you described, newgirl, we wouldn't have as many problems.”

“Oh yeah, Chili, clear cutting happens out of ignorance. Loggers who clear cut, don't know enough about the trees and the forest to even be out there. Mill owners who hire loggers that use such practices are idiots too. They are putting themselves out of business.”

“No power in the Northeast, Fires out of control in the Northwest,
Chili got married in the South?

It is Armageddon.”

“Good gawd, the entire West is on fire. You should be getting rain soon. It's drying out on the East, so I guess the rain we were getting has to fall somewhere.”

“It has less to do with logging and more to do with weather and forest growth cycles. 90% of the areas that are burning (a close educated guess) are not areas you could log; wilderness, steep terraine or eastern Montana pine and grass fires. There's a real misconception out there that just because it's timber it's harvestable.

Also, when the timber burns, it starts a new cycle, puts nutrients in the soil and builds up the forest to the climax species, where it burns agin and starts over. It's a lack of perspective; fires have burned down huge areas and they have re-cycled for thousands of years (soil records show Yellowstone has totally burned off every 500 years). We only see maybe 70-80 years and think it has always been, and will always be, that way.”

“I don't know about the loggers in Montana, but in the South, after a logging operation, there is more fuel left on the ground after the fact than there was before.”

“In regard to clear cutting, I am seeing some interesting practices in the south where bands are clear cut in intervals. The brush is bulldozed and either removed or burned and the area planted back in Loblolly Pine.

What results are a type of fire break in case things get out of hand in the other areas.

I understand how this happens. If a wild fire broke out in Sipsey with all the blow down, it would be out of control for a while.”

“Fire suppression contributes to the buildup of organic materials (fuels) on the forest floor. Logging adds heavy fuels in the form of limbs, tree tops, and cull logs. In some areas, these heavy fuels have been removed by slash disposal (fuel treatment), prescribed fire, or firewood collection.


Here's some info I found:

"By the early 1900s, fire exclusion began altering forest composition and structure. The disruption of natural fire regimes has decreased the diversity of forested areas across the landscape. Frequent fires once killed conifer seedlings encroaching into forest meadows, maintaining numerous open parks in the region's highlands. Fire exclusion permits this encroachment, and meadow acreage has decreased significantly. Establishment of young trees in older stands has provided a fuel ladder for carrying fires into the canopy. With more stand-replacing fires, average stand age is reduced; the diversity inherent in old stands is lost.

Because of heavy fuel accumulations, fires that occur now are more intense and more difficult to contain. Certainly there are more larger fires and more catastrophic crown fires today than historically. On Southwestern forests, the number of fires burning more than 10 acres has increased each decade since the 1930s. The average size of fires since the 1970s has ranged from 14 to 16 acres per fire, double the average size of fires in the earlier decades of the 1940s to 1960s."”

“I was thinking of that, chili. Not very pretty, but it might keep the whole thing from burning.

And that's very interesting, aero. It almost sounds like if we want to keep the whole forest from burning, we need to let it burn once in a while.”

“Bingo!”

“The forest service is wising up over the years and they do conduct prescribed burns. BUT, we're in this drought cycle out here where it's 100 degrees with 5% humidity for months on end and there's really nothing you can do except try to protect structures. Even areas that have been logged, thinned and well-managed are highly suseptable to burning. Like Newgirl pointed out above; the moisture content of the timber under these conditions is lower than kiln-dried!!
You can't imagine how dry it's been here this summer; the soil is like powder!”

“Well, I guess you can look at the bright side. After it burns off, you won't have to worry about another one for a while.”

“It's like in the movie "The World According to Garp" when he was looking at a house to buy and a small plane crashed into the second story.
"I'll take it! What are the odds that will ever happen again?!"”

“I think he called it "pre-disastered," didn't he?

Wow. Stay safe, folks! That smoke inhalation is bad business. Am sending those snowy thoughts your way.”

“OK, I just read one more article about the huge fires of 1910 - it's pretty interesting! The last part:

"The fires of 1910 were stopped only when rain and snow began falling on Aug. 23. Despite all the advances in techniques and equipment since then, the firefighters in the Bitterroots now are also looking to nature for relief.

''You just pour money onto a fire until it rains,'' Petersen said. ''Hopefully it will snow in the next month or two.''”

“WE ran into the same situation in Alberta. Ash and soot covered the tent and car. We could barely see miles that were only a couple of miles away, and breathing was difficult.

I really hate to see the Montana Mountains on fire, since so much has already been burned. Will any trees be left when we hike the CDT again?”

“There should be plenty of trees left. When you look at the satellite photos it's in pretty small areas compared to the who forest. I came through Banff on Sunday and I couldn't see the mountains from the highway!”

“Yeah, what Aero said is true and I didn't mean for it to sound like every tree out there is harvestable or that logging contributes in a large part to any of these fires in the state. I only meant to say that careful logging in reachable areas and good clean-up practices after can be a benefit to the forest and the lumber industry in certain areas and help to keep some areas from being such a large fire risk.”

“Richard Widmark?”