“We have an open draw on the Treasury,” Babbitt said after a briefing at the National Interagency Fire Center.   The money from the Treasury can be used to cover overtime, lodging and transportation for fire crews.  Nearly 19,000 civilian and military firefighters were spread throughout the West – 14,000 of them in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming where most of the active fires burned.

The fire center reported 92 major fires burning in the country on nearly 1.1 million acres.  So far this year, fires have burned 5.22 million acres, the worst fire season in at least a half-century.  “It’s a very tough situation,” Babbitt said. “We’ve got two, three more weeks, maybe a month of fire season, and the weather prognosis is not very good.”  Babbitt declined to estimate the cost of the firefighting effort, which at the end of July was put at $15 million a day.

The priorities remain firefighter safety and community protection, he said, declining to speculate on any policy changes that may be made to avoid the same kind of fire bust in future years.  “There’s going to be lots of time after September 15 to reflect on lessons learned,” he said.

In Montana, ranchers on horseback tried to herd cattle out of the way of a 38,000-acre wildfire burning southeast of Helena. Other ranchers cut barbed-wire fences in the hope cattle would find their way to safety, said Ben Hess at the Gallatin County emergency operations center in Bozeman.

People have fled ranch homes but officials said they did not have a count on the number of evacuees, nor did they know how much property was lost. Some homes were destroyed, said Mike Koehnke, disaster and emergency services chief for Broadwater County.  Other huge fires burning across Montana showed little movement.  “The fires have been behaving themselves the last couple of days,” Forest Service spokesman Kevin Kennedy said from Hamilton.

In Wyoming, a wildfire that closed the busy southern entrance to Yellowstone National Park was heading into wilderness Friday, but another fire threatened a historic lodge built by Buffalo Bill Cody near the park’s east entrance.  Gov. Jim Geringer was expected to declare Wyoming a disaster area because of fires, drought and the resulting financial risk for farmers.

In Idaho, the 147,000-acre Clear Creek fire, the nation’s largest, was burning actively as fire crews labored to keep it away from a Girl Scout camp and the watershed for the city of Salmon.

Smoke from the fire that has burned since July 10 prompted the state to declare the air in the Salmon area unhealthy and issue an alert for the elderly, children and those with lung problems to remain indoors.  By BOB FICK, Associated Press Writer 

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Helping out 'is just the way it is'

WALL MOUNTAIN (AP) – Jeremy Morris was wrestling a crew-cab pickup and its big horse trailer slowly, slowly down a one-lane dirt road in a narrow canyon behind a bawling cattle herd and three women riders when he suddenly broke out laughing. “I don’t know ANYBODY I’m working with,” he said. “I don’t have a clue.”

It was praise for Montana, not a complaint. As he had said earlier, “That’s just the way it is – everybody is helping everybody.”  Jeremy, meet your fellow volunteer cattle rescuers:  The horseback lady in the brown hat, whirling three feet of reins overhead and making that impressive yell, is Carole Plymale. Those 70-odd head of cattle she’s intimidating belong to her and her husband, Chuck Plymale.  The other horseback lady, the one with the piercing whistle, is Carol Zirkle, an artist from Toston.  The lady on the mule – over there, in the brush to the right – is Montana Highway Patrol officer Scout Ferrell, a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter, on her day off.

Somewhere over in the next canyon Chuck Plymale, his daughter Carrie, and Donald Messling, a Toston horse trainer, were pushing about 100 more cattle toward the intended rendezvous, the Wall Mountain cabin.  Morris, 25, had volunteered at an impromptu meeting of ranchers back at Joel and Peggy Flynn’s place near Townsend, about 30 miles southeast of Helena. He would drive Messling’s truck and horse trailer so Messling, Zirkle and Ferrell could help ranchers herd their cattle out of the path of the huge wildfire chewing its way across the countryside.

Morris had raced from Dickinson, N.D., the day before to help his parents, Del and Barbara Morris, when they had to flee their house up Dry Creek. Now that they were safe – “I don’t have anything to do – I’ll do it,” he had said.

It was a 50-mile route to the grazing area – 33 miles east on U.S. 12 through Deep Creek Canyon, then dirt roads into the Big Belt Mountains. It would be four times as far back. They would learn later the fire had closed U.S. 12 behind them. “Seeing that big smoke gives me the exact same feeling I got going into a fire zone in Vietnam,” Messling said.  Along the way to the grazing area Ferrell used a cell phone to report a new spot fire east of them. The main fire was west of them.  “This is really not good,” said Ferrell, the ex-firefighter. “This is really not good.”

They met up with the Plymales at a big meadow near Wall Mountain where several ranchers were rounding up several hundred head of cattle. Smoke towering over a ridge a couple of miles away signaled the Toston-Maudlow fire was getting close.  The ranchers had bulldozed a firebreak just 12 feet wide in the sagebrush between the cattle and the ridge.  “It’ll never hold,” said Ferrell.

Ferrell, Messling, Zirkle, Chuck and Carole Plymale and daughter Carrie, 19, rode east in search of the scattered Plymales cattle. Morris, 25, and Dave Plymale, 23, waited with the trucks and horse trailers until the word came by radio. “The forest Service wants everybody out.”  Within minutes after the exodus of trucks and horse trailers, smoke spilled over the ridge, crept through its clefts and engulfed the huge grazing area. The 300 to 400 head of abandoned cattle disappeared in the smoke.

When the two groups of riders had the Plymales cattle safely in a meadow near the Wall Mountain cabin, Ferrell consulted again by telephone.  “U.S. 12? OK. So we’ll have to go south to Wilsall to get out? OK. OK. Oh, man!”

Back roads took them to Ringling, on U.S. 89 – and cost Messling a flat tire on the horse trailer. His spare was flat – but then came Marvin and Barb Neufeld and their son, Craig, from Havre, down for the wheat harvest. They not only had what it took to repair the tire, but a compressor to air it up, as well.

“That’s just the way it is – everybody is helping everybody.”  Then it was 54 miles south to Interstate 90, west past Livingston, Bozeman, Manhattan and Three Forks, then north 30 miles on U.S. 287 to Townsend and home. At 10 p.m.  They went out again the next morning.

“That’s just the way it is ...”           The Associated Press 

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Montana fire survivors include injured bear cub

HELENA, Mont. (AP) – Fifty years after firefighters rescued a bear from the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico and named him Smokey Bear, a small cub has emerged burned but alive from the wildfires that have charred forest and rangeland across Montana. But don’t be too quick to call this bear Smokey, Smokey Jr., or even Little Smokey. Trademarks and bureaucrats are involved.

“We can’t refer to this bear as Smokey,” insisted Cass Cairns, information officer for the Bitterroot National Forest. “Because that is a Forest Service trademark, with the symbol and the story. This is a similar-type story as the original. But to be able to associate this cub with it, there has to be certain legal loopholes that have to be pursued. We’ve had a succession of Smokey Bears in zoos. But there’s a process they have to go through. There’s a protocol. We can’t just call this one Smokey on our own,” she told the Missoulian.

The cub, apparently orphaned and weighing only about 20 pounds, was in a Hamilton veterinary clinic Sunday, with burns on all four paws. “He’ll be a little tender-footed for awhile, but he should be fine,” said Joe Jacquith, the state wildlife warden who rescued the animal that he calls the bear or the cub, and nothing more personal.  “The reality is I don’t want this bear to grow up to be a poster child for anything,” Jacquith told the Missoulian. “I want it to be released in the wild. this is going to be a wild bear if I have anything to do with it.”

In Montana on Sunday, the 30 most significant fires had burned about 600,000 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho. More than one-third of the land is in the Bitterroot Valley, where hundreds of evacuees remained out of their homes. Some fled more than two weeks ago. Light winds helped clear out smoke throughout the state, but did not lead to major fire activity, officials said.

A blaze near Toston, between Helena and Bozeman, remained a major challenge for firefighters Sunday. Estimates of the size ranged 60,000 to 100,000 acres, said Kimberly Landl, a Helena National Forest spokeswoman. Landl said aerial mapping likely would provide better information Monday about the size of the Maudlow-Toston fire.

Ranchers still had no word on cattle that had been grazing in the area and could not be removed in time after the fire started Tuesday in a grain field.  On Sunday, utility crews completed fire-related repairs to a major power line that carries electricity to the West Coast. That line and its twin shut down automatically when the Maudlow-Toston fire burned underneath them, but service was restored Saturday. On Sunday, one line remained in service during repair of the other.

Part of U.S. 12 between Townsend and White Sulphur Springs remained closed because of the fire, but an evacuation order for some homes in southeastern Broadwater County was lifted, said Graver Johnson of the Gallatin County emergency operations center. Other evacuations remained in place, including those for Meagher County’s Grassy Mountain subdivision, where about 20 buildings were threatened.

In Hamilton, the black bear, who was not given a name, received dog food as he rested at a veterinary clinic, Jacquith said. He had set a trap for the young animal in a burned area southeast of Darby, after a resident told him of the animal’s plight. The cub was “skin and bones,” but had gotten water from a creek and meat from the carcass of a burned deer, Jacquith said.

He said the cub is too young to spend the winter alone in the wild and may be moved to a Helena wildlife shelter after the veterinary care. Eventually the cub will be released into the wild, he said.

Twenty miles south of Big Sky and 12 miles west of Yellowstone National Park, crews Sunday returned to the 7,800-acre Beaver Creek fire after high wind fanned flames Saturday and made firefighters retreat. The wind also grounded helicopters and airplanes that had been dropping water and retardant. The fire, started by lightning Aug. 11, triggered the evacuation of several ranches in the area.

In the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, the Mussigbrod fire grew to 29,142 acres, through expansion of the fire and better mapping. Over the weekend, crews reinforced a fire line extending about 10 miles from the Big Hole Battlefield National Monument.

The Kootenai National Forest of northwestern Montana had about 110 fires, burning 27,000 acres altogether. Evacuees in the Eureka area were to meet with officials Sunday night, to talk about the possibility of returning to their homes briefly.

Fire lines were holding as the Lydia and Stone Hill fires burned within a half mile of residences.

In extreme southeastern Montana, a 3,000 acre wildfire was burning 35 miles south of Ekalaka. The Cedar Butte blaze was likely caused by lightning early Sunday, said Jean Claybo, of the Billings Interagency Dispatch Center.

“Right now they’re just trying to get resources to it. It’s such a distance from anything,” Claybo said.

By SUSAN GALLAGHER, Associated Press Writer 

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Governor advised to close more land in Montana 

HELENA (AP) – More Montana forest and grass land, in 16 counties from Canada to Wyoming, should be closed to all public use because the wildfire threat is severe, a group of state and federal agencies says in a preliminary recommendation to the governor.

The Northern Rockies Coordinating Group reached its conclusion over the weekend and sent it to Gov. Marc Racicot, state forester Don Artley said Monday. Racicot said his decision on the recommendation could come as early as Tuesday.

The question before him is whether to expand a land closure he issued last week. It shut access to state and private land in all or parts of nine western Montana counties plagued by fires. Companion orders closed federal and tribal lands in the areas.

Federal agencies have authority to extend the closure of federal land, but Artley said such action would await a decision by Racicot on other land.  Racicot said one unresolved issue is whether Flathead and Lincoln counties, in Montana’s northwestern corner, should be included in any new closure.

The closure suggested by the federal-state group would affect forested and grass land in Beaverhead, Broadwater, Carbon, Cascade, Gallatin, Glacier, Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Madison, Meagher, Park, Pondera, Sweet Grass, Stillwater, Teton and Toole counties. That area has been under restrictions that limit logging, off-road vehicle use, campfires and smoking.

Already off-limits to the public are most or all forested land in Deer Lodge, Granite, Lake, Mineral, Missoula, Powell, Ravalli, Sanders and Silver Bow counties.

Ed Mathews, fire management officer for the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, said the recommendation to close more land is based on “the unprecedented extreme high fire danger in this whole central zone, the threat to public health and safety, the unprecedented number of wildfires and the very extreme lack of resources we are able to get to combat those fires.”

While officials weighed issues of land access, an orphaned bear cub with bandages on its burned paws was moved out of a veterinary clinic Monday in the Bitterroot Valley, and became a symbol of survival in Montana’s long summer of wildfires. The bear, injured as it moved about the scorched forest floor in the Bitterroot Valley and too young to immediately return to the wild, was transported to a state shelter in Helena, where it was kept out of public view. Officials said they wanted to shield the bear from the stress of public exposure.

Wildlife officer Joe Jaquith caged the bear cub and moved it out of the Hamilton veterinary clinic that provided care over the weekend, after its rescue in the Bitterroot National Forest.  “I gave him an apple and a drink of water before we started,” Jaquith said as he transported the bear. “He’s doing great.”  Jaquith, who rescued the animal Saturday, suspects fire killed the mother.

The animal’s plight rekindled the story of Smokey Bear and the cub who symbolized the fire-prevention mascot after being plucked from a fire in New Mexico 50 years ago.

The military Monday also prepared to send soldiers from Kentucky and Marines from North Carolina to the fire lines, to help the thousands of firefighters already in Montana. Thirty major fires have burned more than 600,000 acres in the state, more than one-third of them in the Bitterroot Valley.

Major fire battles began about a month ago, and even with help from military and Canadian crews, personnel shortages have been chronic.

The National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho said an Army battalion from Fort Campbell, Ky., would be sent to Montana late this week and Marines from Camp LeJeune, N.C., would follow within a few days.

Firefighters in Montana include more than 700 toiling between Helena and Bozeman on the Maudlow-Toston fire, which has destroyed buildings and left cattlemen wondering whether grazing livestock survived. The fire was measured at 75,000 acres, after weekend estimates that ranged from 45,000 to 100,000 acres.

“The fire today has been pretty calm, settled down, the wind has been calm,” Broadwater County Commissioner Jim Hohn said. County officials lifted an evacuation order, and a spokesman for neighboring Gallatin County said no other evacuations remained in effect.

All evacuation orders for the Blodgett Trailhead fire in the Bitterroot Valley also have ended, the Forest Service said.

No cattle deaths from the Maudlow-Toston fire were confirmed, but officials received many calls about missing cattle and were trying to help owners find livestock that roamed as pastures burned, fences with them, said Graver Johnson, Gallatin County fire information officer.

Donations of goods and money have been arriving in the state as news of Montana’s calamitous fires spread.

The governor’s office received four cases of nasal spray from a New Jersey company. State officials planned to send them to the Bitterroot Valley area with 200 cases of Fig Newtons that Nabisco Inc. donated for firefighters after the father of a pilot flying a fire helicopter made a request.

The American Red Cross in smoky Missoula got donations of face masks, indoor air filters, bottled water and food, but said it is short of sunscreen and lip balm. Major fires in the state Monday had burned or were burning 263,000 acres in the Bitterroot Valley.

The Beaver Creek fire south of Big Sky and West of Yellowstone National Park was measured at 7,800 acres, and a crew was assigned to protect buildings at the Nine Quarter Circle dude ranch.

Other fires included the 15,585-acre Stone/Young Complex and 7,500-acre Kootenai Complex in northwestern Montana; the 32,364-acre Middle Fork fires and 33,574-acre Mussigbrod Complex in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest; the 18,200-acre Clear Creek Divide fires northwest of Missoula; and the 17,718-acre Ryan Gulch fire souteast of Missoula. In the Lolo National Forest, the Upper Nine Mile fires were on 25,000 acres near Huson, and the Monture-Spread Ridge fires had burned 21,600 acres east of Seeley Lake.   By SUSAN GALLAGHER, Associated Press Writer 

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Forest Service: It's the small trees that create fire risk

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Forest Service wants to boost efforts to remove small trees and brush near western communities in response to wildfires raging this summer, agency officials said Tuesday.

Trees 12 inches in diameter and smaller pose the greatest threat of fires in places like Flagstaff, Ariz., Missoula, Mont., and Santa Fe, N.M., officials said. “Our single most important objective aside from protecting lives is reducing unnaturally high levels of fuel,” said Chris Wood, a top aide to Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck.

A draft Forest Service plan last April called for thinning, prescribed burns and other fire prevention efforts on 40 million acres of agency land. The effort would cost $825 million a year by 2015, the plan said.

President Clinton earlier this month asked the Agriculture and Interior departments by mid-September to come up with ways to rehabilitate burned land and reduce fire risk to rural communities. Clinton’s request was a response to wildfires that have charred more than 5.5 million acres this year. Thirty major fires were burning Tuesday. GOP lawmakers, who have pressed for more logging, hope the Forest Service relies heavily on the agency’s draft plan from last spring in responding to Clinton’s request.

The Forest Service, which oversees 192 million acres of federal forests, is part of the Agriculture Department. Wood said agency officials are still responding to Clinton’s request. He said he did not know whether the September plan would include estimates of acres that should be thinned, or an estimate of how much prevention efforts would cost.

Environmentalists worry that agency officials will use the fires as an excuse to push more logging across the West. “If the Clinton administration wants to do this to 40 million acres of our national forests it would be a travesty,” said Matthew Koehler of the Native Forest Network in Missoula, Mont.

But Wood said, “The whole idea that this is a timber issue is malarkey. This is an issue of reducing fuel loading.” The Forest Service in past years has had no trouble removing large trees from forests because the job was cheap and easy. Timber companies were eager to harvest on federal lands and take the trees to market. But the smaller trees are not as commercially valuable and have been left standing.

Dombeck emphasized the need for federal money for small tree removal when he sought emergency fire prevention funds from Congress following fires this spring in Los Almos, N.M. But GOP congressional aides said the administration should not attempt a “politically correct” fire prevention effort.

The Forest Service is going to have to knock down some big trees as well as small trees if the agency wants to prevent fires in the West, said Doug Crandall, chief of staff for the House Resources Committee’s forests and forest health subcommittee.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, said the Forest Service may not be able to carry out any plans to thin forests. He worries other administration rulemakings – such as one to protect road less areas in forests – may block tree removal efforts.

“Hopefully there’s an awakening going on as the western skies are filled with smoke,” Craig said.  But he added, “I’m going to be a skeptic. They’re going to have to prove to me they mean this.”     By JOHN HUGHES, Associated Press Writer 

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Third Billings National Guard unit sent to the fires

Tommi Derudder was planning to begin athletic conditioning Wednesday with her basketball teammates at Rocky Mountain College.

Dan Drobny was in the middle of tourist season and thought Wednesday was going to be just another day directing vacationers to hikes near the Rock Creek Resort in Red Lodge, which he manages.

Their plans changed Tuesday. Montana National Guard higher-ups called, telling them to report for duty in Billings Wednesday morning. Capt. Drobny, Spec. Derudder and 42 other men and women from the 443rd Quartermaster Supply Company were being shipped ou t to spend 15 days fighting fires in the Bitterroot Valley.

"We're jazzed," Drobny said as the loaded bus behind him started its engine. Soldiers on board urged the officer to hop in so they could begin their journey to Missoula. "We've got everyone from sc hoolteachers to trades people to truckers to a college basketball player on board."

The 443rd's typical mission is to supply fuel and oil to units in the field. For the next two weeks, they will be manning security checkpoints surrounding the Valley fires. Other Montana National Guard units have already deployed from Billings.

Two bus loads of soldiers from the First-190th Field Artillery Battalion will return to Billings Thursday afternoon after spending two weeks fighting fires. About 220 men and women f rom this unit were trained for two days at Fort Harrison in Helena before being sent to the front lines of the fire, said Sgt. Robert Carson. Eighty of the soldiers are from Billings, with the rest from batteries in Eastern Montana.

The battalion was activated Aug. 10 and started with mop-up work on the Boulder fires. Next, they were sent to the fires near Toston. "They're tired, they've been putting in 12 to 16 hours days fighting fires, cutting timber, making paths," Carson said. "That's some rough count ry over there. But the morale has actually been pretty good considering what they've got into."

The National Guard boasts of having "citizen soldiers" who work other full-time jobs apart from their Guard duties. As such, the soldiers need to take time away from their civilian jobs to fight the fires. "Employers have been really cool," Drobny said. "Some employers were even paying the soldiers while they were gone," Brewer added.

With no rain in sight, Carson suspects many of the soldiers will be returning to the fire. "There's rumors out there about being reactivated again," he said. "As long as we need to, we will be there. That' s part of our mission." About 55 soldiers with the 163rd Infantry returned from the fires two weeks ago. The men and women were with the front-line firefighting crews, said Sgt. Craig Brewer. When they stepped off the bus in Billings, "they were still pumped up, " he said.

Morale has been higher than the smoke over the state, Brewer said. Dozens of National Guard units from around the nation are fighting the fires and the Montana units have special pride in helping to defend their own state, he said. "They're all pumped up for it," Brewer said. "It's our duty. It's what we're supposed to be doing. Our mission is dual - we're to defend the nation and the state."

Spec. Derudder actually volunteered to fight the fires before being called up. Last week the RMC student returned after helping with transportation at the Cave Gulch fires near Helena. She and other Guardsmen and women made sure Humvee vehicles were always near the firefighters in case the fire switched course a quick escape was needed. "The fire can turn around in a heartbeat," she said.

"I really enjoyed it," said Derudder, a Joliet native. "I'm really looking forward to going back (to the fires). I like doing physical work like that." When not playing forward on the basketball court, Derudder is studying psychology and elementary education.

"If I wasn't so far along, I'd change over to forestry, knowing what I know now," she said. As the bus carrying soldiers from the 443rd closed its doors and headed to Interstate 90, Brewer shoved his hands into his pockets and took a deep breath.

"I wish I could've gone on that bus," he said. "But I can't. I'm a recruiter." The fires have more people interested in the National Guard, he said.

"I have gotten a lot of calls from people asking 'How can I be a part of this?' " Brewer said. "I tell them 'Join, join up.' "    By JAMES HAGENGRUBER, The Billings Gazette 

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Ranchers report Toston-Maudlow Fire area fish kills

Fish kills have been spotted in stretches of Deep Creek in the heart of the Toston-Maudlow Fire, according to local ranchers. Ranchers, who rely on the woody, grassy hills in the Deep Creek area for grazing, have been permitted to look for renegade cattle during recent evacuations. Some of those ranchers have returned home with stories of dead fish turning up in local streams.  “People are seeing a lot of dead fish along Dry Creek,” said area rancher Peggy Flynn. “There’s an awful lot of dead fish.”

Len Walsh, fishery biologist with the supervisor’s office at the Helena Ranger District, said that although he has not personally seen any dead fish as a result of the Toston-Maudlow Fire, similar blazes have been known to affect streams in the past. “I’ve seen fish kills in other fires,” Walsh said. “McClellan Creek had a fish kill in the 1988 fires, and I wasn’t successful in determining why.” However, Walsh said, when a fire does result in a significant fish kill, it could be attributed to any number of factors.

When streams run as low as they are this year, water temperatures can become elevated. And when vegetation burns off the hillsides, the ash that’s left behind can easily wash into streams. A loss of streamside vegetation can also play a role.  “Fish kills could be due to elevated water temperatures, low flows or ash getting into the stream,” Walsh said. “It could happen after a rainstorm when a big slug of sediment washes into the stream and kills the fish. In rare occasions, a dump of retardant directly on a stream can also result in a fish kill, though I’ve never seen that happen.” But Walsh said the impact such events have on fisheries often depends upon the magnitude of the event and the size of the stream.

“In 1984 in the Beaver Creek Drainage, that drainage did burn hot and we had a big thunderstorm that washed a slurry of mud into the creek, which was more than 50 percent solids,” Walsh recalled. “As far as Dry Creek goes, I’d have to see how much of that drainage burned. From the reports I’ve gotten, the burns in there have been spotty at best.”

Fisheries Biologist Ron Spoon, who works with the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks based in Townsend, said it’s rare that immediate short-term fish fatalities occur as a result of fire. Rather, Spoon said, most fish kills occur after the fires – after significant rain events wash sediment and ash into the stream. As a result of that threat, Spoon said, post-fire recovery efforts may look at reseeding areas to prevent heavy sedimentation. “We may have to perform sediment control along the stream,” Spoon said. Spoon, who has been monitoring the sediment levels in Deep Creek for some time, said it will be interesting to see the effects the fire has on the stream.

Spoon said he also has a temperature monitoring station set up on Deep Creek, and if ranchers’ reports of fish kills are legitimate, he said he would look for a spike in water temperature as a result of the blaze. “We have several years of data from monitoring the sediment load in that stream, and we’ll have a perfect opportunity to monitor this event,” Spoon said. If the fish kills are happening, Spoon said, low water flows could also be playing a part. “Deep Creek is extremely low this year, running at half or one-third its normal levels,” Spoon said. Spoon, like Walsh, also remembers the Beaver Creek incident and the resulting fish kills that occurred after the fire and heavy rains. “Beaver Creek got put out by a big rain event, and it flushed a lot of sediment into the stream,” Spoon said. “That resulted in a lot of dead fish.”

Spoon said Deep Creek is home to mostly brook trout, with a small population of rainbow and cutthroat trout.                       Martin Kidston  

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"I try to stay indoors," the scientist said, "and I close everything up tight. Who would want to breathe all that?" Hao is heading the fire chemistry project at the Forest Service's fire sciences lab, located at Missoula' s Rocky Mountain Research Station. His interest, he said, focuses on how smoke from wild land fires impacts global climate.  Worldwide, he said, enormous fires scorch wide swaths through grasslands and forests every year. In the tropics, people use flame to clear land for grazing and agriculture, for timber and for human settlement. In places like Africa, he said, enormous fires burn across savanna grasslands as ranchers turn to flame to encourage young, tasty green shoots for spring pastures.

"Much of Montana, Idaho and the West is burning," Hao said, "but when considered on a global scale, this is a very, very small contribution to atmospheric smoke." It's not enough to create a "nuclear winter," not enough to kill crops, not enough to change vast weather patterns for the long-term. It is enough to taint East Coast sunsets, but it won' t color the evapotranspiration cycle for long.

Nevertheless, he said, the smoke choking Missoula is, like the smoke of the tropics and elsewhere, swirling with pollutants and greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide, a major component of the smoke, will linger long after the haze has cleared, bouncing heat b ack at the Earth's surface rather than allowing it to escape.

At the same time, aerosols released by the fires work to cool the atmosphere. Whether the greenhouse gasses and aerosols will balance each other out is anyone's guess, Hao said. And while he doubts the amount of carbon dioxide produced in the West this summer will have an impact on regional climate, he does believe that, in the short-term, the heavy layer of haze will cool local temperatures. The smoke, he said, will work like a heavy cloud cover, keeping the warming rays of the sun from reaching the ground.

Even after the smoke clears, Hao said, many of the chemicals carried skyward by the towering columns will linger. Over time, they will rise into the jet stream, disperse around the globe, and mingle with similar chemicals from similar fires on other continents. Nature, fortunately, has provided a chemical scrub brush to cleanse the atmosphere. When ultraviolet light from the sun hits the oxygen in air and water, the result is chemicals that break down the smoky pollutants. Some fragment in a matter of minutes; others, like nitrous oxide, remain stable for more than a century.

Still other chemicals end ash such as the chlorinated compounds hiding in the haze end ash will cut holes through the ozone before they break down. "You start with this single event, this smoke," Hao said, "and you get all these impacts: threats to human health, air quality, changes in troposphere chemistry, creation of a stratospheric ozone hole, changes to global climate. All from one source. It's remarkable."

And while the plumes rising from the West are but a drop in the atmospheric bucket, they will have an impact end ash even if science isn't certain what that impact will be. "Just the fact that we have 200,000 acres burning in the Bitterroot will change something," said Bob Keane, research ecologist at the fire sciences lab. " The smoke might change the way thunderstorms build, for instance, but we'll never know."

Science, he said, hasn't evolved far enough to ferret out such cloudy and complicated cause-and-effect relationships. The problem, said climate change researcher Dan Fagre, is that "there are patterns on top of patterns, and they interact, compounding each other and canceling each other out."

Greenhouse gasses raise temperatures while aerosols cool the atmosphere; smoke in the troposphere changes thunderstorm activity, but so do El Nino and La Nina cycles. "That's why climate is so hard to predict," Fagre said. "That's the randomness of the universe. Deal with it."

One thing science is certain of, however, is that anecdotal tales of cold winters following hot fire seasons are largely apocryphal. Scientists agree there is nothing about the smoke created in a fire season such as the one currently scorching the West that would lead to a severe winter.

In fact, the current fire season pales in comparison to historic events, Fagre said. The million acres aflame since July doesn't hold a candle to the 40 million or 50 million acres that went up in smoke in 1749, and there was no mini-ic e age following that event, he said.

Rather, it is more likely that hot, fiery summers often are followed by cold, snowy winters because La Nina patterns often are followed by El Nino patterns. There simply isn't enough smoke in the West, Fagre said, to impact the global heat-energy balance to the point of affecting major systems like the jet stream. In fact, Keane said, his computer-modeling research indicates that more carbon dioxide may be produced by growing forests than by burning them. Old forests, he said, with lots of woody material to support, require lots of respiration to stay alive. The result, he said, is that big trees end ash which breathe out both oxygen and carbon dioxide - actually exhale more carbon dioxide than they take in. And when those trees fall, he said, they rot away, putting out even more carbon dioxide.

A fire, on the other hand, puts out one great gasp of carbon dioxide, but soon succumbs to snow and rain. The young growth that crops up in the burned-over soil doesn't have a massive woody core to sustain, and so does not need to respire in the same way as an old forest, Keane said. The young plants, unlike their elders, take in far more carbon dioxide than they put out, and when balanced against the one-time fire plume result in a total decrease in greenhouse gasses.

Science has known for years that excluding fire from the landscape has resulted in fuel loads that fired larger and hotter blazes, but the suspicion that fire suppression also may have increased carbon dioxide levels is relatively new, and not just a bit controversial. Keane's research also indicates a century of fire suppression has drawn down stream flows, as water has gone toward tree growth rather than into riverbeds.

"After this fire season, Bitterroot streams will run fuller as a result," he said. "I have no doubt about that." That is, unless the smoke changes thunderstorm activity and pushes rain elsewhere, or La Nina dries out the skies.

And if the rivers do run faster, he said, they are sure to run with more nutrient and sediment, as rains pull blackened topsoil off fired landscapes. In addition, the particulates that Hao shuts his window against will fall into those streams, adding slightly to the nutrient load.

"That's what is so fascinating about fire and smoke," Hao said. "Smoke has impacts throughout the ecosystem, from human health to river systems to global climate change. It' s very exciting."                        By MICHAEL JAMISON

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More military troops head for Montana as wildfires continue

HELENA, Mont. (AP) - An Army battalion from Fort Campbell, Ky., headed west Friday for Montana wildfire duty, as the state moved toward its sixth week of catastrophic burning. With the addition of those 500 troops and additional support personnel, the number of firefighters and managers in Montana will rise to about 12,000, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Idaho.

Another military infusion is planned next week, with the arrival of least 500 soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Monday, said Marine Maj. Curtis Hill, military liaison at the Idaho center. About 560 Army troops from Fort Hood, Texas, came to Montana on Aug. 13 and have been fighting the Upper Nine Mile fires, burning 19,291 acres in the Lolo National Forest.

Bound for Missoula, the first of four aircraft left Fort Campbell at 9 a.m. MDT and the final plane was scheduled to lift off by 3 p.m., said Capt. Carl Purvis, Army spokesman. "Some of this stuff like the fire shelter thing kind of concerns me and I hope I don't have to use it," Sgt. Daniel Stearns said in Kentucky. Firefighters carry folded shelters to cover themselves for emergency protection against flame.

Meanwhile Friday, President Clinton ordered the federal government to make as many as 2,000 managers and supervisors available to support efforts to combat wildfires in the West. The Agriculture and Interior departments will immediately send personnel to assume management and supervisory positions.

"Our federal firefighters and management personnel are working under extremely dangerous conditions to protect the public and our lands from the threat of these wildfires," the president said in a statement. The increase in firefighters comes as 25 major wildfires burn 627,560 acres in Montana.

In the five weeks since the state's season of fire began, some 300 buildings have burned, about 70 of them homes, the Northern Rockies Coordination Center in Missoula said. There have been hundreds of evacuations, mainly in the Bitterroot Valley. Jim Chinn of the Ravalli County Sheriff's Department said many evacuated residents are back in their homes, but he did not have numbers Friday.

The Fort Campbell battalion, complete with a surgeon and four helicopters, was being sent to the Bitterroot fires, which account for more than one-third of Montana's burning acreage. Fire bosses expect the troops to begin working next week after training through the weekend. Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor Rodd Richardson said having the Fort Campbell infantry in his forest will be special, because he served with an infantry unit during the war in Vietnam.

"You develop close ties with other soldiers and your unit when you share the experience of war," Richardson said. "Thirty years have not changed that for me."  The Fort Bragg contingent will go to fires in northwestern Montana's Kootenai National Forest, Hill said.

Fire crews worked in relatively calm conditions early Friday as they braced for weekend storms and high wind in parts of the state, particularly the Townsend area, where a fire has grown to 81,000 acres. Traffic on 33 miles of U.S. 12 east of Townsend was limited to guided convoys after smoke closed the route for a time Thursday. The fire remained one to two miles from a subdivision with 18 homes. With smoke sickeningly thick in some parts of the state, the American Red Cross was distributing $200 indoor-air filters to asthmatics and other people with critical medical needs.

The charity, which has spent more than $500,000 on the Montana fire emergency, also distributed face masks and has served more than 21,000 meals and snacks from its trademark red-and-white trucks. Other services include a class to help parents help their children deal with emotional effects of the fire crisis.

For the Red Cross, this disaster is different than others, such as hurricanes, volunteer Bob Howard said Friday in Missoula. Because the fires have continued for so long and there is the ever-present risk of new fires on lands tinderbox dry, the organization is providing emergency response, recovery and readiness services simultaneously, Howard said. 

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