Photo of Glacier Fire School in 1940.

July 14th, 2008

Walking In Their Footsteps

With the coming of Glacier National Park’s Centennial (in 2010) I have found myself often reflecting on Glacier’s fire history and researching the park’s influence on National Park Service fire management.

When Glacier was established, in 1910, they were experiencing a fire season similar to the one we had more recently in 2003. The new park staff must have had their hands full! For this reason, and up until the 1940's when the area entered into a cool and wet period, Glacier was the pre-eminent ‘fire park’. During this time period Glacier garnered most, if not all, the attention of the nascent National Park Service fire program. I hope to blog specifically on some of these topics in the future but, briefly, here is a short list of some of Glacier’s achievements in fire management during the early part of the 20^th Century:

• Glacier was the first National Park to have a dedicated fire crew (prior to this time the Army/Calvary and, later, the National Forest Service were solely in charge of fighting forest fires).

• In the early 1920’s Glacier was the first National Park to bring the new technology of ‘portable’ (horse drawn) pumps into the United States from Canada.

• Glacier was quick to build fire lookouts and, by 1923, they had run phone lines to three of the park’s established fire lookouts. 

• Glacier established the first fire management plan in the National Park Service. In 1929 a newly appointed “fire control expert” at the national office used Glacier’s plan as a benchmark; ‘the model against which other plans were measured for the subsequent decade’*.

• In 1946, Glacier was the first National Park to utilize Smokejumpers.

One of the pleasures of working in fire management at Glacier is the sense of the past that we get from working in our historic office buildings. I am writing this, in fact, from the same building that the Glacier Firefighters in the 1940 group photo (above, left) worked in. Though I cannot put names to the faces, I’m sure that I’ve seen the signatures of some of these individuals (either etched inside of our historic hose tower or on fire reports in our archives). 

I would love to speak with some of these folks today. I doubt that they would be surprised about our recent fire activity (the size and scale of which is similar to the fires of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries) but I would sure be curious to ask them about fire management ‘back in the day’. During the relatively quiet fire seasons between 1940 and 1988 it was probably easy to forget our last big fire cycle, but what a challenge it must have been to establish a new fire program in a new park (within a new agency) between 1910 and 1930!

* This quote (and much of this blogs information) was taken from ‘A Test of Adversity and Strength: Wildland Fire in the National Park System’ by Hal K. Rothman, 2003.

Photo by Mitch Burgard

Firefighters Drift on July 3rd, 2008.

July 6, 2008

Firefighters Drift

Hello from the fire management office at Glacier National Park! I am the ‘Prescribed Fire and Fuels Specialist’ at Glacier and I’m thrilled to share information about what is happening with fire management in Glacier through this blog format. 

July is upon us, our firefighters and lookouts have been through their training and we are gearing up for the fire season. For now, at least, things are quite green after our first ‘normal’ winter in many years. We are therefore able to help with the national effort and several members of our team are currently assisting with the fires in Northern California. The looming question out there, of course, is what will the fire season be like in the Northern Rockies this year?

It is a favorite pastime of firefighters and western residents to try and predict the upcoming fire season. I will probably blog on this topic frequently but, despite all of the great climatologic forecasts, our tracking of fuel and weather indices and our ‘hunches’ it’s virtually impossible to know what the fire season will be like on most years until late July or early August. Even then, things can change quickly (for better or worse depending on your perspective). As someone once said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.

With the arrival of Independence Day it is time for us to check in on one of our traditional predictive indicators of the upcoming fire season, Firefighter’s Drift. This drift of snow, on the lee (northeast) face of the Apgar Range, has been ‘assisting’ firefighters in Glacier for decades; possibly as far back as 1910 when the park was established.  

Built up by wind-loading of snow over the winter and sheltered from the sun, this drift tends to be one of the last remnants of snow on the eastern end of the Apgar Range. As the story goes, if the drift still exists on the 4^th of July it is going to be an average to below average fire season. If it has disappeared prior to Independence Day it prognosticates a large fire season. Over the years, our fire ecologist has done some investigating on the accuracy of Firefighter’s Drift. As you might expect, it works O.K. on many years but it has ‘missed’ (big time) on several occasions as well. 

For what it’s worth, Firefighters drift was still hanging in there on July 4^th (see photo above, right). The drift, by the way, is by far the largest I have seen it since I came to work in Glacier in 2001. We won’t know if Firefighter’s Drift was an accurate ‘crystal ball’ until late September but, after a decade or so of large fire seasons, I think many of us are hoping that it proves correct this year!

Firefighter’s Drift is a great tradition but it is just one, admittedly ‘folksy’, tool in our quiver. I don’t put all that much faith in winter snowpack as a fire season predictor but, that said, I don’t open umbrellas indoors or walk under ladders either! 

If you are in the park and want to see the drift for yourself, just look to the west from McDonald Creek Bridge in Apgar or from the Fish Creek turn-off at the Camas Road.