The Canyon Creek Fire blowup revisited 30 years later

This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the Canyon Creek fire, which began early in the summer of 1988 but made it's lasting impact when it burned over 200 square miles in one night on Sept. 6.

The summer of 1988 was significant. After a hot and dry summer, fires that had previously been left alone as part of the "let it burn" policy burned out of control. The Forest Service adopted the policy in 1972, which allowed some fires started by lightning strikes in wilderness areas to continue to burn. It was used with relative effectiveness for almost 16 years.

The fires in Yellowstone National Park in the same summer had been allowed to burn as part of that same management strategy and eventually burned more than 1,200 square miles. After the summer of 1988 there was a shift away from the management policy by both the Forest Service and the National Park Service, which has shaped the way all forests and fires are managed.

The Canyon Creek fire began June 22, 1988 in the Scapegoat Wilderness area near Dry Creek. Byron Bonney, who was working for the Forest Service in Lincoln at the time, and Jerry Williams, Fire Management Officer on the Seeley Lake Ranger District on the Lolo National Forest, did a flyover of the fire June 27. The men couldn't see any smoke.

On July 10, Bonney and Nevin Guderian, the Lincoln Ranger District Resource Assistant rode 10 miles to the fire on horseback after smoke had been seen coming from the area.

Bonney went to Seeley Lake the next day and sat down with the district staff. They worked up a fire behavior projection for the next 30 days, which predicted the fire would grow to around eight square miles over that period of time.

According to Bonney, on July 15th, the Canyon Creek fire came to life in a big way, burning some trees in the area. The next day the wind came up and hit the fire area funneling it up towards Evans Peak up Cabin Creek. It covered about 15 square miles in 48 hours.

"This was to be the beginning of a long summer and it blew my fire prediction out of the water in about one week," Bonney said.

As soon as the fire moved out of the Scapegoat wilderness, it was declared a wildfire and was no longer under the "let it burn" policy. The terrain made it difficult to contain the fire to the Lolo National Forest and fire managers paid constant attention, trying to find points where it could be stopped.

"It seemed as though we'd get one point established, the fire would bulge out on another side," Bonney said. "It was an ever growing amoeba, changing shape and size at a moments notice."

The Pathfinder reported on Sept. 6, a jetstream surfaced and the fire grew over 280 square miles in one night. Barry Hicks, who was on a Type 1 Incident Management Team based in Lincoln, recalled the night as they desperately tried to keep up with plotting the ground the fire was covering.

"We were plotting the fire progression on maps all night at Lincoln. We started out keeping track of the fire spread by quarter section and pretty soon we had to go to sections, which are one square mile. Before the night was over we were keeping track by townships, which are six square miles," Hicks said.

Tim Love, retired Seeley Lake District Ranger, was stationed in Choteau, Mont. as a resource assistant for the Rocky Mountain Ranger District in the summer 1988. Love was near Crown Mountain scouting the fire on the afternoon of Sept. 6 since it had burned onto the Rocky Mountain Ranger District. When he was driving back to report to the fire camp located at Elk Creek, the air around him changed.

"Before, the column of smoke was up about 25,000 feet," Love said. "And it just came down, it came down to the earth. It was like driving in the night. You know things are not going well. Things are really bad."

The camp at Elk Creek was evacuated and the fire did approach and burn the area, damaging personal property that had to be abandoned by the fire fighters. It almost burned through the town of Augusta as well.

"When the circumstances are right, that fire's gonna do what it's gonna do and all you can try to do is keep people out of harm's way," Love said. "The crews that were on the fire tried to do that but the thing just blew up."

By Sept. 15, snow and rain in higher elevations had slowed the spread of the fire, but there were already talks of changing the policies that had allowed the fires to get out of control. Supporters and opponents of "let it burn" each blamed one another for the summer of fires.

In reality, the policy was only one factor that caused the fires of 1988 to burn out of control. For both Canyon Creek and Yellowstone, wind patterns and drought fanned the flames. Retired fire behavior expert Tom Swetnam said that fire analysts didn't take drought into as much consideration as they do now.

The Forest Service's policies about where to let fires burn and when firefighters can intervene have also changed. Now, there must be a fire management policy in place for every area managed by the Forest Service before any fire actually occurs and different parts of the same fire can be suppressed or allowed to burn depending on the fire plan for that area.

"Fire can have some bad consequences, for a fact," Love said. "You don't want it to hurt people or burn property. Fire managers are trying to protect those people and resources and reduce those effects. But you have to see fire in its total and not just as something bad."

Lilly Tuholske wrote an article in the Pathfinder article titled, "Rare conditions caused Canyon Creek blowup," on behalf of the Lolo, Lewis and Clark and Helena National Forests. It described the rarity of the fire's behavior in 1988.

"Though it was terrifying for those who saw it, the [Canyon Creek fire] grew so under conditions unmatched in the recorded history of the Scapegoat-Bob Marshall complex," she wrote. "And, it is unlikely that they will be seen again in this area in our lifetime, or for many generations to come."

This article is part one of a two-part series where the Pathfinder explores events surrounding the Canyon Creek fire. Next week part two will gives a first person account of the rescue of two trail crew workers the day Canyon Creek blew up.