Glacier firefighting tactics evolve in 20 years since Robert

Nov 30, 2023

A plume of flame erupts from the side of Apgar Mountain as a deliberately set backfire blackens timber in the path of the 2003 Robert fire. The tactic drew momentum of the main blaze away from the West Glacier and Apgar communities.

A firefighter watches a helicopter ferry water to hot spots on the Robert fire along the shore of Lake McDonald in July 2003.

Vic and Shirley Daniels move belongings out of their home in West Glacier after an evacuation notice went out as the Robert fire grew closer on July 23, 2003. Fire officials were preparing for a possible burnout of an area between the fire and West Glacier.

Karin Powel uses a wet handkerchief to ward off the smoke as she and Ernst Mueller bicycle on Blankenship Road near Columbia Falls during the Robert fire in 2003. Powel and Mueller had come from California for an organized bicycle tour that was supposed to cross Going-to-the-Sun Road, but ended up detouring because of the highway's western closure due to fires.

A firefighter soaks timber and underbrush along the perimeter of a planned backfire near the Fish Creek Campground during the 2003 Robert fire. The tactic blackened thousands of acres of forest north of West Glacier and Apgar, but prevented the main fire from overrunning the communities on July 24.

Smoke from the Trapper fire billows as it makes a run toward Granite Park Chalet on July 24, 2003. The fire overran the Going-to-the-Sun Road at the Loop but didn't damage the chalet, where 35 people took refuge.

Spectators watch the Robert fire make a nighttime run from a dock on Lake McDonald in 2003. The fire burned 57,570 acres in a season that saw 13% of Glacier National Park burn.

Standing on the Apgar beach looking at a tower of smoke rising aside Lake McDonald’s western shore, a wildfire meteorologist put a new spin on my sense of time.

“See how it’s shaping into a mushroom?” he said as the pyrocumulus cloud climbed thousands of feet in the air. “That’s releasing the same amount of energy as the atom bomb over Hiroshima. It’s just over a day instead of a millisecond.”

The energy was coming from the Robert fire in 2003. That was the biggest of six fires that year, which in total burned 13% of Glacier National Park. The beginning of the 21st century was the inflection point for fire frequency in much of the Rocky Mountain West. It also saw the overturning of the 20th century’s American paradigm of fire suppression.

While most features of Glacier encompass time frames of thousands or millions of years, wildfire effects change in hours or even seconds. Perhaps because it’s on such a more human scope, we tend to relate to fire like a wayward pet — something to be trained, leashed, disciplined and deployed as we see fit. But just as glaciers shaped mountains, fire may be forcing us to rethink our place in the landscape.

The human-caused Robert fire started on July 23, 2003 — a Wednesday. By Friday morning, it had grown to 7,000 acres. From its ignition point on the Flathead National Forest side of the North Fork Flathead River, it jumped the water and soon threatened Glacier’s visitor facilities at Apgar as well as the community of West Glacier. Apgar was under a voluntary evacuation order by Thursday, as was all the GNP employee housing in West Glacier. A Type I incident command team from Alaska took charge that day, too.

Glacier Park fire manager Jeremy Harker was a ground-pounder during the summer of 2003. The Robert fire was the new kid on the block, coming behind the established Trapper and Wedge Canyon fires. Wedge Canyon had destroyed five homes and a dozen outbuildings in one run Thursday night. Winds up to 30 mph drove the fire on a 10,000-acre run between Thursday and Friday, including one spurt that scorched a mile and a half in 30 minutes.

The Northern Rockies Interagency Support Cache in Missoula was sending $310,000 in equipment by semi-truck to West Glacier every day at the end of July. The cache held about $11 million in inventory, including pallets of first-aid supplies organized for 100- or 500-person camps. A cache manager joked the pallets “come with everything but the doctor.”

It was a dark joke. Earlier that week, Idaho firefighters Jeff Allen, 24, and Shane Heath, 22, died when they were overrun by the Cramer fire as they were trying to clear a helicopter landing site. They had rappelled into the site just before it made a run from 220 acres to more than 5,000 acres.

Tourists were all over Glacier Park, hiking the trails, driving the roads, and filling the campgrounds. The Robert fire smoke towered over the West Glacier entrance gate, making the threat ominous. Locals tried to maintain business-as-usual attitudes as they pre-packed keepsakes and cleared brush from their summer cabins.

The Trapper fire burned in the center of the park, while Wedge Canyon spread between remote Kintla and Bowman lake valleys. But Robert aimed its energy at Glacier’s busiest gateway, main employee housing and headquarters, as well as numerous private homes and businesses. It called for different tactics.

As the strategy options coalesced, Harker said the modern awareness of fire impacts came into play. Where once saving timber for future logging was the prime goal, now ecological, wilderness and recreation values competed for attention.

“The Robert fire started on Forest Service ground, and they put on some very aggressive initial attack,” Harker told me in 2022. “Then it crossed into the park, where we’ve had some fire suppression in the past. In the 1960s, we had ‘dozers up in the Apgar Mountains fighting the Huckleberry Mountain fire. That left a lot of resource damage done for not a lot of benefit gained.”

2003 would see some very different tactics.

On July 23 (Wednesday), the Trapper Creek fire crossed the Going-to-the-Sun Road at the West Side Tunnel, burning over much of the Loop trailhead. It raced uphill straight at Granite Park Chalet and Swiftcurrent Pass. The threat was dire enough that GNP officials ordered an evacuation of Many Glacier on the east side of the Continental Divide.

Terry Tempest Williams was celebrating her father’s 70th birthday at Granite Park that day. In an essay reprinted this summer in “Campfire Stories: Tales from America’s National Parks,” Williams wrote of how she slept through dreams of bats abandoning the forest in spiraling clouds. The next morning, with flames visible in the valley below, a helicopter arrived and deposited a single smokejumper captain, who “found a canvas director’s chair, carried it to the top of the knoll, sat down, and crossed his legs as he gazed toward the burning horizon, offering us a relaxed image, the epitome of calm.”

Then the bats truly came flying out of the trees at 4:30 p.m. Williams recalled the deer running out of the trees as embers blown out of the oncoming smoke wall ignited spot fires around them.

Williams wrote how GNP ranger Chris Burke and the smokejumper gathered the chalet guests together and broke the news: The Trapper, Robert and a third fire had combined into what was now known as the “Mountain Man Complex,” aimed right at them. There was no further help coming.

“The winds were picking up dramatically;” Williams wrote. “It was increasingly hard to hear. Chris and the captain passed out particle masks. We stood on the porch bathed in an eerie orange glow, watching in disbelief as firs and pines exploded into flames with pieces of charred bark raining down on us. We could feel the waves of heat as the flames roared from all directions.”

Swiftcurrent fire lookout Christine Baker was on the radio to Burke: “There was no mistaking it when Trapper decided to make its move,” Baker wrote in the Glacier Park Foundation’s newsletter “Inside Trail.” “I was looking right at it when it did. That wimpy white column suddenly grew tall, turned to brown, then black. Then it was wider ... and moving. I remember calling the fire cache and trying to sound calm, controlled — but feeling that this was pretty darn outrageous and that they’d better get on the stick and DO something. ‘It’s crowning!’ I remember saying, and it was, and moving fast.”

After wetting down the chalet roof as much as possible (with a balky pump Burke had jury-rigged back to life), the guests and firefighters retreated inside the chalet as the inferno raced uphill toward them. The 35 people gathered in a circle, with the children in the center, and sat on the floor. Burke told them that as the flame front arrived, it would likely blow in all the windows and suck out all the oxygen before moving on.

A relative of Williams’ who’d abandoned the chalet for a position in the rocks near the Grinnell Glacier Overlook watched the fire come within 200 feet of the stone chalet, split around it, and rush on toward Swiftcurrent Pass without breaking the glass. Burke later stated it came through “with 200- to 300-foot flame lengths and 70 mph winds.” But everyone survived, including two BLM employees who nearly had to dive into outhouse pits to avoid the blast. The plastic porta-potties at the Loop had melted into piles of goo.

The Robert fire took its most notable run on Monday, July 28, 2003. Flathead County Sheriff’s deputies asked about 500 people from West Glacier to Coram to evacuate as the fire bore down on the park’s gateway community. One Fish Creek camper refused to pack up her trailer, telling rangers that was “her husband’s job” and he was golfing and not to be disturbed. Some opted to stay. One Many Glacier resident called it a slumber party: “There were only about eight of us left on the whole street, and we stayed up late watching the fire. We were out there playing golf in our nightgowns.”

Missoulian photographer Tom Bauer spent the afternoon watching the defenses of West Glacier get put in place. As dusk came, he realized the risk of the fire getting to town could be calculated with a coin toss. Not wanting to leave a prime position for documenting the scene, he asked a crew boss where his best safety zone option was.

“He told me to drive my truck into the middle of a golf course fairway, close the windows and turn on the air conditioning,” Bauer recalled. “Then just sit tight.”

Before Bauer had to pull that rip cord on an escape plan, the Alaskan incident command crew went on offense. Alaskan firefighters enjoy the home-field advantage of training inside millions of acres of low-risk forest values, so they can test firefighting tactics that might seem impossible in the real-time decision-making of a Lower 48 wildfire.

The commander ordered retardant bombers and helicopters to soak a 6-mile line along the Camas Road for three straight hours. A structure crew marched to the summit and wrapped the lookout tower in burn-resistant foil. Then Glacier Superintendent Mick Holm signed an order for a squadron of helicopters loaded with flammable pingpong balls to drop an arc of flame around the base of Apgar Mountain.

“They put a god-awful lot of water and retardant down before they started burning,” firefighter Jim Butler told Missoulian reporter Michael Jamison. “Every time you looked up, you saw them dropping again. It was constant.”

The plan was to slow-burn a defensive space between the main fire and the homes and businesses in Apgar Village.

“We’re talking 10 or 12 square miles,” Butler told Jamison. “Maybe 6,000 or 8,000 acres. That green you see, all that green from the river up, it’s going. It’s going up in smoke.”

But the visible result was more dramatic. The firefighters started their defense in a creek drainage along a flank of Apgar Mountain. The burnout shot up the cleft, creating a hot draft behind it. Essentially, the creek bed became a chimney, and the plume from the Robert bent back against the wind and sucked up the chimney.

“We walked it right up the mountain, just as planned,” Butler said.

“As we watched, that pyrocumulus cloud bent over to the west and then collapsed,” recalled Jamison, “It pulled all the momentum out of the firestorm.”

A similar burn took place on the south flank of Apgar Mountain to protect West Glacier. Burnouts of that size were routine for the Alaskan team, which often sparked tactical blazes of 50,000 acres or more on their home ground.

Everybody in West Glacier drew a relieved breath. But the Robert fire was far from done. The burnout consumed about 5,000 acres of forest a mile northwest of Apgar. Fire crews had to scorch another 3,000 acres farther up Howe Ridge to form a buffer for Kelly Camp, the little collection of private inholder cabins at the northwest corner of Lake McDonald. The fire had cut the road around the north end of the lake, so firefighters were getting ferried across from Lake McDonald Lodge on the tour boat DeSmet. At least once it got lost in the thick smoke before someone provided a compass to take instrument headings.

Glacier Park seasonal ranger Bill Schustrom was working at the Apgar Visitor Center that summer when the Robert fire got him reposted as fire information officer. He’d spent decades before operating the DeSmet tour concession, and seen many fires. Robert was different.

“It’s too smoky to breathe deep,” he told Jamison. “I was up on Logan Pass, and it was pretty bad. You could hardly see the mountains at all. They were just faint outlines against the haze.”

Every time the southwesterly winds picked up, Schustrom could see the fire front flare and fill the upper McDonald Valley with smoke. The good news, he observed, was that finding a parking space wasn’t a problem at the usually overwhelmed Logan Pass Visitor Center.

At the north end of the lake, Glacier Park Incorporated President Cindy Ognjanov was trying to arrange her “third grand opening this year” at Lake McDonald Lodge. The first was the typical late spring visitor season start. Then the hotel got evacuated on July 28 as the Trapper and Robert fires threatened to converge. The hotel reopened briefly but closed after a second evacuation order came on Aug. 10.

That day, the temperature at West Glacier was 97 degrees. Humidity was 8%. A north wind blew along the crest of Howe Ridge at 20 mph all day long, again putting the McDonald Valley at risk.

“The initial report was it had spread a couple hundred acres and had two-hundred-foot flames,” fire information officer Jim Lane told reporters. “Now, who knows how big it is. It made some 20- and 30-acre crown runs.”

Hundreds of Lake McDonald hotel workers had to bunk in the employee dorms at East Glacier for part of the season. The staff at the popular Apgar restaurant Eddies’ decamped to the private home of one co-worker, whose family had a place on Lake Five. At least 20 were foreign exchange students, hailing from Bulgaria, Russia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Australia, Colombia, Poland and Ireland.

“We are trying to get organized a little, but we’ll be fine,” Eleanor Bell told Missoulian reporter Sherry Devlin as her daughter’s restaurant colleagues crowded into the house. “The kids really didn’t have any place to stay. They don’t even have cars.”

With each closure, Ognjanov lost another handful of seasonal hotel staff. By Aug. 20, she was “trying to salvage the world” and the vacation season on a search for replacements. After the second evacuation, the lodge staff had removed all valuables, from perishable food to historic photographs.

The disruptions reduced her usual contingent from 140 down to barely 40. “It takes a lot of work to get things together and running again,” she told Jamison. “We still have a lot of people to take care of this season. We still have a month to go.”

When the season-ending rains finally came Sept. 8, the Robert fire had blackened 57,570 acres. Wedge Canyon had scorched another 52,974 acres. Trapper, despite its notoriety, tallied 19,150 acres.

Where the Robert fire rampaged up the Camas Road northwest of Apgar, unbroken thickets of young lodgepole pine now block the view of the McDonald Valley.

“Each fire resets the clock on stand age,” Harker said. “The Robert fire was a stand-replacing fire for the most part, replacing all vegetation. The Camas Road is now mostly ‘doghair’ lodgepole. Farther up north, you can see the obvious history, with the 1988, or the 1926 or ’29 fires. You can find those stands that are a thousand years old and see they’re ready to be replaced.”

The doghair lodgepole grows so thick, it shades out almost any other vegetation on the forest floor. Eventually that weakens the stand itself, leaving it vulnerable to new fires or insect infestations. The 20-year-old Robert regrowth stands about 10 feet tall. In scars from the 20th century, the trees are 30 or 40 feet tall and the mix of species has grown more complex.

Historic photos of Glacier Park show a changing story. When Mary Roberts Reinhard took her horseback tour across Dawson Pass in 1920, her party had a rolling meadow to picnic in and pose for photographs. Hungry Horse News editor Chris Peterson repeated her journey a century later, but could no longer repeat the photo perspective. The trees had grown so thick, the picnic meadow was overrun.

“Before this area was really settled, the first written accounts described hillsides very burned and red from large fires,” Harker said. “That stand at Dawson Pass was probably replaced in the late 1800s, and that stuff is 150 or 200 years old now. It’s ready for stand replacement again.”

Long before white settlers started domesticating the forests of the Rocky Mountains, Indigenous tribes routinely used fire. They burned valley bottoms and hillsides and prairies to improve grazing and berry production, to clear travel corridors, and to drive big game into kill zones.

Lewis and Clark recorded seeing huge plumes of smoke on the horizon as they approached the Rockies. Lightning and other natural events contributed to some ignitions. But archaeological and cultural evidence shows now that regional tribes had a systematic method of burning their landscapes for deliberate purpose.

Settler farming and ranching practices didn’t involve such techniques. Instead, they actively discouraged fire as a threat rather than a tool. Ironically, by domesticating the landscape, they dramatically increased its burning potential.

The U.S. Forest Service mobilized to prevent wildfires after the Great Burn of 1910. Its leadership adopted the 10-o’clock Rule: Any blaze detected in the nation’s public lands should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the next morning. And from 1911 to 1920, firefighters with shovels and horses could contain 96 percent of the blazes to under 300 acres. But they were still fighting on those pre-cleared landscapes, where the conditions were stacked in their favor.

Since then, a century’s worth of fire research shows this region used to see a much more regular and different kind of wildfire. Those more widespread and frequent fires occurred in the cooler spring and fall months as well as the hot midsummer, and consumed tons of branches, shrubs and grasses on the forest floor. But after decades of aggressively extinguishing forest fires, that fuel buildup has increased the probability of catastrophic fires in the worst possible weather conditions.

Historical fire research reveals some discomforting facts. The number of wildfires and acreage burned in the continental United States at the start of the 20th century is almost identical to the start of the 21st. But the fires of the last century happened all through the season, small, medium and large.

Since then, California has developed a nearly year-round fire season. Blazes in Arizona and New Mexico often blacken multiple hundreds of thousands of acres. And northwest Montana is typically the last region to come into fire danger every summer. By then, national firefighting budgets may be expended, aircraft and crews depleted, or still engaged when Glacier starts to smoke.

Those costs get spread to every American taxpayer, regardless how far they live from the forest. Property and Environmental Research Center fellow Judson Boomhower calculated the moral hazard of insuring home development in fire-prone landscapes spread about 20 percent of a home’s value onto fellow citizens through government spending on wildfire suppression and insurance costs.

Fire-scarred forests throughout the Rocky Mountains may become grasslands because the growing seasons have become too hot and dry. That could have a dramatic effect in the truly ancient cedar-hemlock groves, such as the Avalanche Boardwalk.

“We may not be wet enough to get that forest to come back,” Harker said. “It takes decades, if not centuries, to replace those under conditions we’re not anticipated to have. The fires of the last 30 years have chipped away at the outer edges of the cedar-hemlock forest at the head of Lake McDonald.”

As the tempo and severity of wildfire seemed to shift up at the start of the 21st century, so did the ecological science response to fire.

“We’ve only been letting fire play a natural role on purpose since the mid-1990s,” Harker said. “It was around 1994, 1998 that they, on purpose, let natural fire occur on the landscape on a larger scale. But what happens often is they get big, and then that prevents us from doing anything with them. Even if we wanted to put them out, the resource damage and the risk to firefighters is too great in some of the terrain we have.”

“One theme I have year to year is I wish we could do the kind of fire management that’s good for the landscape, like we did with the Quartz fire (a 2022 wildfire in the park’s northwest corner that was allowed to burn unchallenged for habitat restructuring). It’s hard constantly being reactive, dependent on climate and resource availability. That leads us to be reactive the majority of the time. I want to live in that proactive, ecologically prescribed fire regime — to do that stuff rather than responding to fires in the urban interface or out-of-control stuff.”

Human-caused climate change “caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s, and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984,” according to a 2016 study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Additional research from the University of Montana found that soil sterilization wasn’t a factor in tree regrowth, even in the most severely burned areas. Instead, it was a lack of moisture needed for new tree sprouts to grow. For example, studies of the widespread western Montana fires in 2000 found the lodgepole pine stands recovering at higher elevations, but lower-elevation Ponderosa pine and Douglas fir copses failing. And the trend toward high-severity fires has reduced the once-common mosaic patterns that left some undamaged groves mixed into the burned areas.

It’s common to think of wildfire response on a national scale, although even within the million acres of Glacier Park fires in different places behave radically differently. That problem expands like a fractal pattern when one tries to develop a policy that works for the long-leaf pine plantations of the Southeast (where fire has long been a routine part of the very wet landscape), the highly developed and water-deprived California coastal mountains, the desert Southwest and the timber-rich but geologically tumbled Rocky Mountain West.

Last-minute tactics like the couloir burnout strategy might have been “kind of sensationalized for public information,” Glacier Park’s Harker said, but the potential of losing a town drove some hard decisions.

“It’s not something we do on a regular basis or have in our tool box,” he said. “But they might have taken a wild chance to slow down a fire before it hit the town too hard. Twenty years is a long time. All of those folks are no longer in the business. Now we have fewer resources to manage fire and more fires to manage. It’s hard to find workers. Our staff is much smaller than it was in 2003, throughout the National Park Service. And we’re starting to deal with different kinds of fire.”

Missoulian Managing Editor Rob Chaney can be reached at 523-5382 or at [email protected].

Funding and resources for this story were provided by the Alicia Patterson Foundation for science and environmental reporting.

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