1988 Canyon Creek fire remains seared into memory
By KARL PUCKETT, Great Falls Tribune Staff Writer, 08/17/2008 [here]
Two decades after the Canyon Creek fire burned some 250,000 acres in three national forests, the rogue blaze of 1988 continues to smolder in the minds of Montanans.
“You opened a bunch of new wounds,” said Don Converse, a rancher west of Augusta, when asked about it this week. “I’m still burning over this fire.”
The Yellowstone National Park-area fires, which combined to burn 1.4 million acres in Montana and Wyoming, captured the world’s attention in 1988.
But Canyon Creek, a rare catastrophic blow-up, was the single largest fire in Montana in a year marked by big fires and the biggest the state had seen in more than 75 years.
This summer marks the 20th anniversary of the monster, which, carried along by jet stream winds, escaped the confines of the wilderness and burst onto the prairie west of Augusta.
In its wake, it left dead cattle and black pastureland, ranchers with deep scars and firefighters with a new appreciation and understanding of fire.
“Fire can kick your butt,” said Tim Love, the district ranger of the U.S. Forest Service’s Seeley Lake Ranger District, a young resource assistant on the Rocky Mountain Front at the time of the Canyon Creek fire.
Unremarkable start
Today, there are stricter guidelines in place that ensure suppression resources are available before a fire is allowed to burn in the wilderness, said Orville Daniels, the former supervisor of the Lolo National Forest, where the Canyon Creek fire began.
There’s also a better system of predicting fire potential, including a drought index.
Those changes followed the 1988 fires.
“Part of the purpose of the wilderness fire program is to learn,” Daniels said. “And we’re still learning.”
Canyon Creek started like most Western fires do, with a lightning bolt from the sky setting a tree ablaze. But it didn’t end up a footnote like most do.
To a person, those who fought it or fled from its path say the blaze that threatened Augusta and Ovando was a life-changing experience.
“That bugger went wild,” said Ross Friede of Ovando.
At the time, Friede was the manager of the Two Creek Ranch, and he nervously watched as the flames crept closer.
“I still have memories of things I’d seen out there,” said Dale Gorman of Great Falls, the former Supervisor of Lewis and Clark National Forest.
Starts in June
Canyon Creek started June 26, 1988, near Canyon Creek in the Scapegoat Wilderness west of the Continental Divide.
“There was no predicting what it would do,” said Bill Cunningham of Choteau, a Bob Marshall Wilderness outfitter.
Remarkably, Cunningham, a member of a small group on a five-day horse-packing trip, actually saw the birth of what would grow into one of the state’s biggest and ugliest fires.
He took the first photo, when Canyon Creek was less than an acre.
“We started to hear some thunder,” Cunningham recalled. “Then all of sudden a loud crack.”
The lightning struck a mile away, above a pool of water outfitters know as the Devil’s Bathtub.
Cunningham said the outfitter leading the group turned out to be a prophet that day.
“If it gets out of the notch,” he told the group, “there will be no stopping it.”
Fire allowed to burn
Cunningham’s group reported the strike, and a backcountry ranger sent the report up the line to Daniels.
He made the decision to declare Canyon Creek a prescribed wilderness fire rather than a suppression fire, allowing it to burn.
The decision was roundly criticized later, but Daniels saw the fire as an opportunity to reduce overgrowth while stimulating growth of younger trees and shrubs, creating a mosaic of trees in the forest rather than one dominant stand.
“There was apprehension,” Daniels said of the decision. “There was also anticipation for getting some fire on the land.”
Daniels, 53 at the time, was a pioneer in the agency’s prescribed natural fire program, a new emphasis in the agency’s policy. It allowed wilderness fires — suppressed since an infamous 1910 blaze in Montana and Idaho — to burn under the right conditions.
Weather uncooperative
On July 22, almost a month after its start, the fire made a 10,000-acre run to the east.
“The day it did that, we were elated,” Daniels said. “It was exactly what we wanted.”
But the typical abrupt switch in August weather that usually brings cooler night temperatures and rain never materialized that summer, and the fire kept growing. And growing. And growing.
On Aug. 9, fanned by 30-mph winds, the fire broke across the Continental Divide in the Dearborn River area, increasing in size to 33,000 acres. On Aug. 29-30, it jumped to 51,200 acres.
The worst was yet to come, and everybody knew it.
In early September, fire officials were warned 48 hours ahead of time that the jet stream, a super-verlocity wind current, normally blowing high above the Earth at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, would touch the ground somewhere in the western U.S.
“It did touch down, right on the Canyon Creek fire,” Daniels said. “And when it did, we had the greatest run on a fire in recorded history up until that time.”
Jet stream hits
The jet stream touched down the evening of Sept. 6.
Daniels said it was akin to turning a bellows on the fire. Nobody alive had seen anything like it.
“The fire went totally out of control,” he said.
Over the next 16 hours, and into Sept. 7, the wind-fanned fire raced across 117,000 acres.
In one five-hour stretch, it traveled 21 miles. Flame lengths reached more than 200 feet into the sky.
The 25,000-foot smoke plume, which had been vertical, suddenly collapsed to the ground as the jet stream was pushing the fire east toward Augusta.
“It looked like a piece of braded sweet grass,” Gorman said.
Love was in a fire camp on Elk Creek on the prairie west of Augusta when it was burned over.
About 70 firefighters were forced to deploy fire-protection shelters.
Love, who went from tent to tent making sure nobody was left behind, arrived home at 7 a.m. the next morning. He woke up his wife.
“I think we’ll be lucky if nobody died,” he told her.
Property destroyed
The loss claim of Converse, the rancher living four miles west of Augusta, was the second biggest in the fire.
He lost his great-grandmother’s homestead, a barn, the blacksmith shop, 26 head of cattle, 36 calves and 3.5 million board feet of timber being actively logged at the time.
“It burned the crap out of me,” he said.
His land includes mountain pasture that borders Forest Service land on Elk Creek. Dead trees still fall onto his fences.
The night Canyon Creek blew up, Converse, with help from his brothers, worked frantically from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. to build a fire break, using two Cats.
Earlier in the summer, he said, ranchers had begged the Forest Service to put the fire out. He’s still peeved and doesn’t think the agency learned any lessons from the experience.
“Nothing changed,” he said.
Eventually, Mother Nature, which started the fire, put it out when snow fell.
The fire burned 247,000 acres in the Lolo, Lewis and Clark and Helena national forests, destroying six cabins, 100 cattle, 40,000 acres of pasture, 200 miles of fence and 1,500 tons of hay.
It stopped five miles short of Augusta after running out of fuel on the prairie. Evacuation plans had been prepared. Fire lines had been dug around the town.
“They were not very happy with us,” Gorman said of the ranchers. “They were in shock, the same that we were with all the loss that occurred.”
Gorman joined one rancher to inspect dead cattle that the fire caught in a draw. “He knew every one by name,” Gorman said.
Lessons learned
After Canyon Creek, fire officials turned to the history books for some answers and found some, Daniels said.
In ponderosa pine forests, small fires burn at regular intervals, but large, intense fires with more years in between are more typical in the lodgepole forests that dominate Montana, he said.
“These large fires were normal,” Daniels said. “We did not pick up on that early enough.”
A fire similar to the Canyon Creek fire almost burned up Augusta and Choteau in 1898, he said.
Forest officials read the notes of the employees who did the surveys of the Lewis and Clark National Forest boundary near the turn of the century.
The surveyors recorded seeing smoke coming out of the wilderness so thick they had to wait six weeks for it to clear in order to get sun readings with their sextants, he said.
In 1988, it happened again.
“I think it made us more aware of what your options are,” said Eloise McNally, the postmaster of the Ovando Post Office, whose ranch was threatened by Canyon Creek. “You don’t have any.”