Cold front helps slow down f ire season

A rare August cold front with quenching rains poured into Montana last week, at least temporarily slowing down the 2019 wildland fire season.

Just as Smokey Bear was celebrating his 75th birthday last Friday, a large weather system also arrived in western Montana. Lightning sparked a few new fires but plentiful rain also eventually washed over the area, keeping the new starts reasonably small.

The Plains/Thompson Falls Ranger District picked up one of those new starts last Thursday evening on the slopes of Pat’s Knob across the Clark Fork River from Paradise.

A module of three firefighters, backed by a light helicopter equipped with a bucket making water drops, hiked into the fire Thursday night. The fire was burning in heavy forest fuels with very unforgiving terrain, including rock outcrops and steep slopes.

Firefighters on the scene in fact called the fire the Cliff fire, in respect to where it was located. Upon observing the size of the fire more closely in the morning – it was burning in two spots on the rocky hillside, totaling about six-tenths of an acre – eight more firefighters were called in.

The fire was declared dead out and the 11 personnel on it hiked off the mountain Saturday evening.

The Cabinet Ranger District also picked up a fire from the weekend’s storms in the Elk Creek drainage behind Heron. That one-tenth of an acre fire was located and contained Sunday, and an official on the Cabinet said they expected to call the fire dead out in the next day or two.

Before the wet weather arrived last week, the 5.5 acre Mandy Gulch fire was also subdued by the Plains/Thompson Falls Ranger District, with assistance from the Montana DNRC, the Plains/Paradise Rural Fire Department and the CSKT Division of Fire. The cause of that fire is under investigation.

The Mandy Gulch fire was declared totally out by fire managers last Thursday evening. Mandy Gulch is a sub-drainage of Rock Creek in the upper Thompson River drainage, approximately 30 air miles north of Plains.

Although recent rains have temporarily put a damper on the 2019 fire season, several days of dry weather could put us back into high fire danger in the coming weeks.

For current information on wildfires burning in this area, please visit the Sanders County Wildland Fire Information page on Facebook.