Wildfire Epidemic Destroys Dreams Along With Forests

Gusts of wind shake the pines in the yard. Lightning stabs down from the clouds. Good, think Sam and Kathryn Minor as they watch from their little house in the canyon. A little rain might take the edge off the heat.

But the rain never comes, and in 15 minutes the storm clouds pass.

Sam and Kathryn go to bed and think no more of it until morning, when they see--beyond the ridge, deep in the Bitterroot National Forest--two fat plumes of smoke.

*

The West is burning as it hasn’t burned in 50 years.

Daily headlines recite the facts: This many million acres charred, that many homes destroyed. What numbers can’t convey is the dread and suffering every blaze brings. This is a day-by-day account of one canyon, one family and one of the wildest wildfires ever seen in the Northern Rockies.

Not Only Trees at Stake

Experts say fire is an ecological necessity in the arid West, nature’s way of cleaning house.

But ask those who live here, who breathe smoke for weeks, who watch flames dance in the blackened hills above their homes--if they still have homes--and they will tell you that when the forest burns, more is lost than the trees.

Sam and Kathryn Minor felt they’d found refuge when they moved last month to the foot of Coyote Gulch, 15 miles south of Darby in southwestern Montana.

Sam, especially, had seen hard times the last few years. Age 57 and disabled after two decades of roofing work in Las Vegas, he’d weathered an ugly divorce and the deaths of his two teenagers.

“Drugs--and more drugs,” he explains tersely.

But then he found Kathryn, 48, and together they found a slice of paradise. They bought a small house with a big detached workshop, tucked away on two acres between Highway 93 and the East Fork of the Bitterroot River.

It is quiet, private and just a stone’s throw from the edge of the Bitterroot National Forest. Best of all, in this increasingly pricey part of Montana, they can afford it: $92,000 with $40,000 down.

They promise each other this will be the last move they’ll ever make.

On July 26 they drive a U-Haul truck up to the workshop and fill it with two lives’ worth of accumulation, both practical and sentimental: Christmas decorations passed down from Kathryn’s grandmother. A china hutch. Bows and arrows. A futon couch. Plastic bags stuffed with clothes. Power tools. Glass figurines. An antique sewing machine. A microwave oven. A fire extinguisher.

They move some furniture and clothing into the house but leave 90% of their belongings in the workshop. No rush, they think. They have the rest of their lives to unpack.

Blazes on All Sides

The Minors aren’t the only ones moving into the neighborhood. Six miles south on Highway 93, a tent camp of 500 firefighters is forming in a meadow to battle a blaze called the Maynard fire, sparked by lightning July 22.

Hopes for any quick containment are dashed the evening of July 31. The dry-lightning storm that Sam and Kathryn see from their house starts fires through the mountains on either side of the Bitterroot Valley.

By the next morning, fire officials count 30 new smoke plumes. They dispatch ground crews and helicopters to dump water on the flames, 200 gallons at a time. They put out most, but six fires keep spreading, including the two the Minors had seen. They call them the Sula Complex and bring in reinforcements.

The next day, Aug. 2, Sam is plucking his guitar and Kathryn is singing along when a sheriff’s deputy pulls up.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, but you have to evacuate,” he says. “You have 10 minutes.”

Sam and Kathryn grab food and underwear and corral the dogs--Bear, Bosco and Cinders--into the car and pickup truck. They drive seven miles up the road and spend two uneasy nights in the basement of friends.

By Friday, Aug. 4, things are looking up. Rain showers are cooling the flames. Highway 93 reopens, and Sam and Kathryn drive home to the canyon.

Firefighters tell them their house and workshop--both with metal roofs--look relatively safe. Four small pines grow near the workshop, but otherwise the two buildings are well away from trees and brush that can catch flying embers.

The closest fire is three miles and two ridges away.

By Saturday, despite the smoky skies and buzzing helicopters, things seem almost normal. The canyon is green and serene. The river bubbles past. “Wonderful,” Kathryn recalls. “Idyllic.”

*

By Sunday morning, Aug. 6, Chip Houde thinks his crews are making solid progress. The 46-year-old smokejumper, part of a team flown in from Alaska, is responsible for 180 firefighters working two blazes across the highway from the Minors: the Gilbert fire, 500 acres, and the Spade fire, already 1,700 acres.

The Spade fire is bumping down a hill north toward some houses; the Gilbert fire is slowly chewing east through the forest toward the highway.

In the morning cool, the fires creep along and Houde’s crews can dig lines with hand tools right along the edges, one foot in the black, the other in unburned duff. Old logging roads provide ready-made firebreaks, and a bulldozer pushes fallen timber out of the way.

By 1 p.m., however, Houde grows concerned. The temperature is in the 90s, the humidity just 14%. The wind is picking up to 15 mph. And the flames lick higher.

Around 3:30 p.m., he sees the column of smoke from the Spade fire, three miles to the northwest, bending toward the Gilbert fire. He knows flying embers can start new fires up to half a mile from the main blaze, which would cut off their escape route.

He calls the sheriff’s office and urges them to close Highway 93, then tells his crews to walk back to the buses. It is a calm, orderly retreat. In another half hour, Houde says, it might not be.

Down at the Minors’ house, the wind is swirling crazily, whistling through the trees, blowing ash through the yard.

About 4:30 p.m. Kathryn is cooking chicken-fried steak when Houde shows up and advises them to evacuate.

Sam groans. “What, again?” He argues and asks if he can sign a waiver and stay.

Houde has no time. “We’re leaving now,” he tells them. “You should too.”

Sam and Kathryn take a look around. To the west, flames from the Maynard fire are shooting up from behind the ridge. To the northwest, the Gilbert fire is running down the hills toward the highway. To the east, yet another mass of flames--the Bear fire--fills Coyote Gulch.

No more arguments.

“Hurry!” Kathryn yells at Sam. “We need to get out of here!”

Within minutes they are pulling out of the driveway, vehicles packed with the same bare essentials they’d taken the first time. The dogs are agitated; their owners are terrified.

On both sides of the highway, flaming trees sizzle like slow-motion matches, in 30 seconds turning from green needles to black skeletons. Chunky embers whirl past their cars. The smoke is so thick they can see barely 50 yards ahead.

“Dante’s inferno,” Kathryn thinks.

“Unreal, like a movie,” thinks Sam.

They arrive at the fire camp--a safe haven, in relative terms. Off-duty fire crews douse spot fires erupting around the meadow. Churning winds, powered by convection currents from the surrounding fires, lift a mess tent 50 feet into the air and slam it to the ground.

*

Back in the canyon, Houde makes sure his crew gets out and tells every resident he can find to do the same. He stays behind to watch, driving from one already-blackened safe spot to another to avoid the roaring flames.

What he sees next is fire of an intensity he’s witnessed only once before in 21 years of fighting fires. With winds gusting to 40 mph, flames boil 150 feet above treetops. “This sounds like a cliche,” Houde says, “but it really was a wall of flame.”

The next day, the camp’s fire-behavior specialist also struggles for strong enough language to describe the blaze, calling it “the high end of extreme.”

By 6:30 p.m., trees aflame and rocks loosened by fire litter the highway, and houses are burning.

By 8 p.m., as the sun dips toward the Bitterroot peaks and the blaze begins to cool, Houde orders crews back in to dig more lines and extinguish spot fires, hoping to save what structures remain. They work through the night and are replaced by fresh crews in the morning.

Sam Minor comes home Monday afternoon, hitching a ride with a National Guardsman patrolling the closed area. He sees the good and bad all at once: The house still stands, but the shop, 40 feet away, is gone.

His and Kathryn’s life belongings are shriveled to a heap of black and gray. Sheets of roofing drape over the ruins like cooked lasagna.

All Sam can think of are Kathryn’s boxes of Christmas decorations. Power tools and furniture can be replaced--not memories.

He kicks the smoldering rubble. He grabs a sheet of hot metal, which leaves a painful welt on his forearm.

While the Minors’ house and three others nearby survive, across the highway six foundations smolder where homes once stood. The houses are virtually vaporized, having burned so hot that only chimneys and thin layers of ash coating the cinder blocks remain.

In the few hours in which the fire blew up, the sheriff’s office says, 52 homes in the forest were destroyed.

By Wednesday, Aug. 9, Houde has rotated off the Bitterroot fires, moving on to blazes in eastern Oregon. The separate fires of the Sula Complex have merged into one big one: 78,000 acres and growing. Fire officials say they might burn until the snow flies in September.

At the canyon, Sam and Kathryn hunt for blessings to count. They’ve lost almost everything, but at least they have their house. “That’s more than some,” Sam says.

They don’t have a signed insurance contract on the workshop, but Sam hopes the binder an insurance agent wrote a few days before the blaze will cover them.

The rest of the week, they watch flames in the hills by night. By day, they walk the property, watching for hot spots, avoiding exertion to keep from inhaling too much smoke. Their scenic vista is now a view of ashen hills bristling with black poles.

Sam looks weary, beaten down. Every time he tries to describe what they’ve lost, tears well and he has to stop.

“This is devastating,” he says, arms folded tight against his chest. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

Then Kathryn shouts from the house: “Sam, the fire extinguisher! Now!”

A stump has flared up on the neighbor’s property. Sam and Kathryn grab two extinguishers and a shovel and run, high-stepping over a wire fence. Sam kicks at the stump, sprays a white burst from the extinguisher and shovels dirt over the embers.

Sam is panting and red in the face. His feet feel as if his cowboy boots are on fire. Kathryn slumps against a blackened fence post, clutching her empty extinguisher.

Across the fence, in their yard, smoke starts billowing from another stump.

“Here we go again,” Kathryn says with a sigh, and Sam trudges toward the burning stump, shovel in hand.