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Smoke blankets Montana's northwest corner |
Michael Jamison
The Missoulian
KALISPELL - Yet another day of scorching
summer sun put the heat to Montana's fire season on Monday, and a thick
pall of smoke blanketed much of the state's northwestern corner.
Not a little of that cloud was pumped out by the Garceau fire, burning 11 miles southwest of Polson.
Monday
delivered “shifting and squirrely fire activity” on the Garceau, said
fire information officer Jill Cobb. “It was very unsettled.”Crews made much of their CL-215 water tanker,
flown in by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and on loan
from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “It's very impressive,” Cobb said of
the aircraft, which scooped up 1,300 gallons of water with each pass
over Flathead Lake. “It makes our firefighting operations very
efficient.”
Cobb said firefighters - including Hotshot crews
from California - worked hard digging hand line on the fire's
northwestern edge, “a corner that's been a real challenge.”
That corner, she said, was “truly steep and rocky, with very dense timber. We're hoping those lines will hold.”
They
would be strained, however, when a predicted cold front arrived behind
gusting winds Monday evening. The fire, she said, has burned over about
3,050 acres, “and if we're lucky, that won't change much tonight.”
Dale
Warriner could use a bit of that luck, too. He's providing public
information on the 8,550-acre Skyland fire, burning just outside
Glacier National Park's southern boundary, up near the Continental
Divide.Monday, crews fought fire with fire there, purposefully torching a black buffer between the blaze and U.S. Highway 2.
That
road, which had been closed, is now open, Warriner said, with escorts
ushering one-way traffic through the fire area. Motorists can expect
delays upward of two hours.
“Tomorrow's supposed to be a little cooler,” Warriner said, “and that's great for us.”
Temperatures that have exceeded 90 degrees should fall to the middle 70s, he said, “and we'll try to take advantage of that.”
The Summit Station Lodge, located at highway's edge, remains evacuated.
The
team of 310 people has been bumped up to 475, he said, and is supported
by four helicopters and retardant drops from air tankers.
Far
fewer firefighters are battling a much larger burn, the Fool Creek fire
west of Augusta. Because that fire is well within the wilderness,
officials have been monitoring more than attacking.
“So far so good,” said fire information officer Cathie Schmidlin. “Today has been relatively quiet.”
Fire
behavior analyst Dan Mindar said the Fool Creek blaze was mapped with
infrared cameras at nearly 11,000 acres, and continues to grow steadily.
He,
like others, is looking forward to cooler temperatures, which he hopes
will break the cycle of “thermal layering.” That's a phenomenon where
higher elevations actually become warmer and drier overnight, priming
fuels to begin burning earlier in the day as the sun heats the fire.
That sort of preheated fire activity is driving other blazes in the region, including the state's largest.
Mapped
at 30,000 acres - twice what it was the day before - the Ahorn fire
“took a huge run overnight,” said information officer Jan Amen. “We had
a nine-mile fire front that ran three miles.”
It ran, she said,
straight toward Benchmark, where several residences and U.S. Forest
Service facilities are located. And it may have run right over a
backcountry ranger cabin.
“There's no way to know,” Amen said. “It was wrapped and protected, but we'll have to wait and see.”
Amen
said the fire is just a couple miles from upper Benchmark, where people
have been evacuated for days. Those in lower Benchmark are on hold,
ready to move if the fire pushed on.
No homes are in the way of
the 2,050-acre Brush Creek fire, however, and a Type 2 fire management
team is expected to arrive there Tuesday. Burning 30 miles west of
Whitefish, dispatchers said that fire was active on its southern side
Monday, where topography and fuels kept the heat on.
The plume, however, stretched to the north and northeast, tracking prevailing winds.
“We
all need to keep an eye on those plumes,” Amen said, “because it's
pretty windy out there, and that's what really pushes fire.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at
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