September 14, 2017
- The first few days of this week were rough ones up here, in terms of fire. The biggest concerns came from a couple of major wildfires just over the Canadian border, both threatening the Glacier country. Driven by high winds, the larger of those blazes took off on Monday night, quickly burning much of the northern half of Waterton Lakes national Park in Alberta, and coming perilously close to destroying the Waterton townsite itself. It was an extraordinary and terrifying night up there.
The next night, the largest fire down in the Bob Marshall Wilderness had its turn. The fire is south of me, in the same forest where I'm volunteering, and I listened to everything unfold on the forest's two-way radio. There's a very-remote fire lookout down there on Mt. Jumbo, which found itself pretty much in the center of things.
This year, Jumbo is staffed by a guy named Bill, and he's been doing the lookout thing for years. I don't know him at all, but after listening to his radio voice for the summer I have a lot of respect for the guy. He's clearly good at what he does, and he clearly loves being stationed at one of the most remote Forest Service outposts in the country. He's soft-spoken and unflappable, and even when he's told to take days off he prefers just to stay up at the lookout. (Of course, he's so remote that it would take him days to hike out of the wilderness even if he wanted to.)
Anyhow, there's been a fire burning west of Jumbo for weeks now, and its threatened to make a run towards the mountain a couple of times. Bill was actually evacuated once, when the danger seemed particularly severe, but he was back up there with a co-worker on Tuesday. That evening, very quickly, Bill started to see fire heading rapidly towards his mountain, a view confirmed by the forest's other backcountry observers. The fire kept moving, and when it was clear that the mountaintop was about to burn the Jumbo staffers hurriedly evacuated the place, taking shelter in the rocks below ... with Bill still sending reports out on the forest radio. A couple miles away, the guys staffing another backcountry Forest Service cabin also had to evacuate, spending the night on a sandbar out in the creek as the fire passed by.
I was on the edge of my seat all evening, glued to the radio waiting for Bill's next quiet, matter-of-fact transmission ... and I'm sure everyone else with a forest radio was, too. I couldn't go to sleep until I heard the report that everyone was OK. (Remarkably, the lookout and the cabin survived, too.) It was an evening experienced vicariously, but still an immensely compelling one. I would have given almost anything to have been there, regardless of how terrified I would have been. And as I've said before, I have tremendous respect for the guys working down in the Bob Marshall.
- That night of fire might have been about the last one of the season, though ... the weather here is changing fast. The temperature at Baptiste began dropping yesterday, and a frigid east wind started hitting the lookout about 10 last night, and it's been blowing almost ever since. The temperature here stayed in the low 30s all day, with a ridiculously cold wind chill, and I've spent most of the day huddled by the tower's little woodstove. It started to snow lightly a little before lunch, the snow blowing around the mountain in 30 mph waves rather than sticking to the ground, and that's still what's happening tonight. I'm wondering if my world will be covered in ice tomorrow morning.
Here's a photo I took of Mt. Baptiste this afternoon, on my way down the tower to get another load of firewood.
