Hunting Guide Ordered to Pay $2.7 Million for Yellowstone Fire

The Forest Service has ordered a hunting guide in Bozeman, Mont., to pay more than $2.7 million to reimburse the government’s costs of fighting one of the forest fires that swept through Yellowstone National Park last summer.

Forest Service investigators said they traced the source of the blaze to camp stoves set up by outfitter Vernon Smith last Aug. 15. They said sparks from Smith’s stove started a local fire that spread rapidly under high winds and became the Hellroaring Fire.

The blaze burned more than 52,000 acres in Yellowstone and an additional 29,000 acres in adjacent Gallatin National Forest before being doused by rain and snow in the fall.

According to federal law, a person proven to have started a fire that burns public land can be required to repay the government for losses due to the fire. The law is seldom used because people found to have started fires usually cannot pay the high costs of firefighting.

Smith declined to comment. Government officials said it is unlikely that he could pay the amount he has been charged, but federal lawyers said they could recoup part of their costs by attaching his property.

Jim Sanders of Gallatin National Forest said the government also has billed Todd Wilkof of Canton, Ohio, who was on a back-country trip led by Smith the day the fire began.

Forest Service investigators said Wilkof used a camp stove that morning. Their investigation concluded that sparks from the stove blew into the dry forest and quickly kindled an unmanageable blaze.

Eleven major fires erupted in the Yellowstone area last summer and fall. Forest Service detectives said they believe that people started three of the fires while lightning was responsible for the others.

By tracing the path of a blaze upwind to its source and checking forest records, investigators often can pinpoint who was at the kindling point when the fire began.

Earlier this year, the federal government charged four Idaho loggers with dropping cigarettes in a forest west of Yellowstone last July. That evidently kindled the North Fork fire, the largest of the Yellowstone fires.

Those loggers were formally charged only with the misdemeanor of dropping cigarettes.