Huckleberry Lookout, which had burned down twice from previous wildfires, is wrapped and saved from burning during the 2001 Moose Fire.

March 20th, 2009

LOOKOUT!

One of the more exciting aspects of working for fire management in Glacier is the opportunity to work with the employees that staff our fire lookouts. Many visitors are surprised that we still utilize Fire Lookouts, but they are one of the greatest strengths of our fire program and it is hard to imagine doing our job without them. Our Fire Lookouts spot multiple lightning fires annually and they are vital for relaying radio communications for Glacier’s staff in the backcountry. They talk with hundreds of park visitors each season and assist with monitoring wildlife and reporting severe weather events. I am hoping to talk one of our Lookouts into writing a guest column about the job in the future but, for now, I thought I would start with a more general overview.

Glacier staffs four fire lookouts each season. Traditionally these have been Huckleberry and Numa in the North Fork, Scalplock in the Middle Fork and Swiftcurrent between Granite Park Chalet and Many Glacier on the Continental Divide. This season we will also be staffing Loneman Lookout in the Middle Fork for the first time since the 1978.

Glacier’s staffed lookouts were built in the 1930’s and they all follow, more or less, the same design. They are generally two story wooden structures with a windowless dirt floor storage area that is topped by a 14 by 14 foot ‘cab’ in which the fire lookout works and lives. A device called an Osborne Fire Finder sits at the center of the room and the Lookout’s bed, desk, cupboards, stove and fridge line the outer walls of the structure beneath the windows. Solar panels and batteries provide some limited electricity. Radios and cell phones are used for communication. Water for cooking, drinking and bathing and propane for heat and cooking are packed up by mule once or twice a month. An outhouse (with a view) serves as the bathroom.

The quarters are tight but hardly claustrophobic (at least when the weather is nice). Situated atop high points and peaks and surrounded entirely by paned glass, the fire lookout enjoys a spectacular view of thousands of square miles of wild country.  Most of Glacier’s lookouts have a ‘catwalk’ that entirely surrounds the cab and that serves as a 360 degree railed porch from which to spot fires. Swiftcurrent Lookout is closer to the ground, sits on a rock foundation and lacks a catwalk due to the high winds that frequently pummel the divide. A catwalk is not required at Swiftcurrent, however, as the lookout is perched on the edge of a sheer drop-off of more than 1000 feet to the north. It is not a lookout for those prone to vertigo!

Lookout work is largely a solitary job with limited amenities. It requires a strenuous six to seven mile uphill hike in grizzly country to work at least 10 straight days in an office space that is prone to getting struck by lightning. It may not be for everyone but, for those whom this line of work appeals to, it is an addictive and blissful lifestyle that they look forward to returning to year after year.

Authors Edward Abbey and Doug Peacock have staffed lookouts in Glacier. Abbey, more of a desert rat than a mountain man, stayed just one season at Numa in 1975; he described the local mosquitos in colorful language that I cannot repeat in this blog! Peacock staffed Huckleberry and Scalplock lookouts between 1976 and 1984. The Lookout that worked the most seasons in Glacier was Leonard Stutsman who logged a total of 22 years between 1961 and 1984 and, more recently, Chris Baker with 14 seasons as a lookout from 1991 and 2004. Our lookouts that currently staff Numa, Scalplock, Swiftcurrent and Huckleberry are planning on returning for their 12^th, 10^th, 3^rd and 2^nd seasons respectively.

If you are up for an adventure, a hike to one of Glacier’s staffed (or unstaffed) lookouts can be a memorable experience.   When the shutters are down, the lookout is staffed and, if the Lookout is not busy, they are generally quite happy to speak with visitors and show you their home office on the mountain. We do request, however, that you wait for the Lookout to acknowledge you and invite you up before you climb the stairs and peer into their windows!

M. Burgard

The fire cache in winter. The word 'cache', by the way, is French for 'stash'. This is where we 'stash' our firefighting equipment (and my office).

December 30th, 2008

'Winter Work'

After a couple of feet of snow during and since Christmas I have found myself shoveling my way into the office each morning. The scenery has really changed around here and along with the snow comes a change of activity in the office. It’s during this time of year when those of us who work year ‘round in Glacier are frequently asked the question, ‘what do you do in the winter?’. This is a tough question for me, and not because I’m not plenty busy.

Pre-fire planning, hiring, budget, reporting, inventory, scheduling, training, meetings, reviewing and updating documents, managing weather, fuel and fire data; there’s more than enough work to go around.   It’s just that describing winter work is complicated and nowhere near as interesting to the person asking as the descriptions of my summer duties (that often revolve around stories that falsely give people the impression that I’m always ‘jumping out of helicopters’ and ‘fighting back flames’).

I’m particular interested in the computer fire modeling work but, as enjoyable as it is for me, I often have trouble playing it up like I can the summer work. “No kidding, there I was, sorting through rows of canopy characteristics data when, suddenly, the weather software completed the calculation of my wind runs!” Though the final products of our fire modeling and mapping work can be quite interesting visually, describing the process of creating them can be, well, pretty dull. 

I have friends in other professions who have tried many times to tell me what an average day at work is like for them. They are articulate and passionate and the work sounds very important and stressful but, when it’s all said and done, I’m not sure I could tell you what they really do. I fear that describing the fire management ‘winter work’ has the same effect on my audience. Often the best I can do is answer with a cliché understatement, ‘I’m getting everything ready for summer’.  

I personally love the dichotomy between the bustling activity of summer and the more quiet and cerebral work of winter. It would be hard for me to work a job that didn’t change character like the seasons but, like winter itself, I’m always as excited to see the first snowfall as I am ready for winter to be over when it starts to melt.

December 5th, 2008

All or Nothing

Like my blog, the fire season was not particularly active this summer and, after many years of record setting fire seasons and very long hours at the office, I took advantage of the quieter season this year to enjoy some personal time outdoors. I just returned, in fact, from a three week honeymoon where my wife and several friends and I rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. After several weeks away from cell phones, email and the fast paced modern world I feel refreshed and ready to talk ‘fuego’ once again.

My first blog entry was about Firefighter's Drift and, this year at least, it turned out to be an excellent predictor of the 2008 fire season. Glacier had only six wildland fires this year compared to an average of around 14 a year since 1910. All six fires were less than one-quarter acre in size. Two lightning caused fires on the west side of the park (near Huckleberry Mountain) were good candidates for managing for resource benefit but they ‘self extinguished’ within 24 hours. Of the four fires that we directly suppressed, two of them were human caused. One was an illegal backcountry campfire near the Middle Fork River that escaped a rock ring and another was likely started by a hiker that had burned their toilet paper near the Kintla Lake trail. The only fire east of the divide was started by lightning near the Rising Sun developed area and it was quickly suppressed by Glacier’s ranger and fire staff with support from Blackfeet Nation firefighters.  Finally, there was a late season lightning storm that started a small suppression fire near private property in the North Fork. That’s all folks, just six small fire starts of less than one acre total. By comparison, the 2003 fire season was approximately 145,000 times larger than the 2008 season!

And that’s the way wildfire goes in the Northern Rockies. It seems that the total number of fires that start during a fire season in Glacier is 6 or fewer or 30 or more and that the total acres burned in the largest fires is less than ten or more than ten thousand…with very little or nothing in between. Studying our fire history and tree ring records it appears that our fire seasons have cycled between several decades of ‘all or nothing’ fire activity ever since the end of the little ice age. Is this season going to kick off an extended cycle of cooler wetter summers and light fire activity or was it an ‘anomaly’ in a continuing dry cycle? Can we even rely on the past wet and dry cycles as predictors of the future in an era of climate change? Stay tuned as these will likely be topics of future fire blogs.

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.