Bear Paw Meanderings
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I hate wildfires. We used to call them forest fires if you will recall but then the prairies started burning as well so the name had to be changed to wild fires.
The Bear Paw fire that we have been in the midst of for a week or more was one of the worst ever but there have been others that have been almost as bad. This is the first one that there was an actual loss of cabins in Beaver Creek Park and that shows how strong and terrible that fire really was.
I learned most about fires when I lived for eight years in the Flathead Valley. I saw firsthand the Robert Fire of 2003 where fire managers had to light a very dangerous back fire in order to divert the fire from burning all the cabins at the head of the lake and Lake McDonald Lodge itself. And there is always the wind. I say always because even though we do have winds that make those fires even worse, they make their own wind that is very bad as well.
When we were evacuating people from Lake McDonald Lodge, there were live embers traveling all the way across the lake and landing on the roof of the lodge. Firemen had to keep water on the hotel for several days to save it even through the fire was on the other side of the lake.
Then there are the inversions. This last Bear Paw fire brought clouds of smoke into the prairies to the north and even embers into south Havre one day.
In the Flathead valley there are such great inversions that smoke lingers in the great valleys of the west for most of August and starts clearing out usually after the first snow when the fires dwindle. Go in August to the Mission Valley, the Missoula Valley and the Flathead Valley and you will usually encounter a smoke inversion lasting days and days.
When Lake McDonald Lodge was closed for the season a couple of weeks ago, it was not because of the Sprague Creek fire burning in the peaks above the hotel. It was because of a huge inversion brought about by smoke from several smaller fires above the lodge. That smoke filled up the hotel every morning. Can’t sell rooms that way and it was very bad for employees so the hotel closed a month earlier than later.
I remember well when driving a Red Bus around Glacier that once in a while there would be a good picture of a wildfire and some of my passengers would want to stop and get a picture. I never did want to stop. Horrible to take pictures of forest fires.
Did you ever wonder why there are so many trees in the Beaver Creek drainage of the Bear Paw Mountains and so few in the Clear Creek drainage?
My uncle Scott told me that a Native American told him that many years ago there was a great fire in the Bear Paws that burned off most of the timber of Clear Creek. The winds were so terrible that the fire actually jumped the Beaver Creek Valley and White Pine Gulch as well. That is why a person can find such huge old growth timber in some areas of the Bear Paws and almost none in other areas. In my hiking days I did come across a huge stump every once in a while that had been burned so maybe there is some truth to that story.
Anyway, pray for rain and snow. Can’t ever get enough of those precious parts of nature!
