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blizzard warnings - 13:52 , 03 October 2013

heelerless - 21:32 , 18 August 2013

Red Coat Inn in Fort McLeod - 11:38 , 23 June 2013

rushing into the waters - 09:53 , 21 June 2013

choosing a spot - 17:43 , 27 April 2013

03 August 2012 - 16:45

ferris on fire

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

We'd been planning on burning this part of the mountain, yes. The feds even tried to light it up this spring. But getting just the right conditions so that your fire carries across the hillside by itself, but stays where you want it and leaves large islands of unburned countryside, and doesn't burn so hot and dry as to kill all the roots and seeds that you want for regeneration in the coming months or years is a sensitive thing.

They had the right soil moisture, air temp, winds and vegetative phenology for two days.

Two days.

Before that it was too cool or too damp. After those two days it was too hot, too dry, too windy and the plants had already started their spring green-up.

We would have to wait until October.

But Mother Nature had other plans. Fortunately, when lightning lit up this mountain, right smack dab in the middle of bug-killed trees that we wanted to burn anyway, the fire crews were only ten miles away, mopping up on our other wildfire.

'Course, they found out that because of our sands and lousy roads, it was faster to go 40 miles back to town, up 65 miles of highway and then south on 20 miles of dirt road than to try to go the 10 miles straight across.

By the time I visited with the chief of the mop-up crew, this new fire was mostly contained, and he was looking at a boring rest of summer and fall of tending to the remaining flares in the high, untouchable rocky mountains. Until the fall snows would put it out.

The rumor is, someone out of a higher office was not willing to wait. Not willing to commit a couple trucks to sitting out here in the desert for a couple months.

Despite the objections of our local fire folks, they lit it up.

And the wind changed.

Yesterday evening I watched their fire race down three miles of ridgeline in less than an hour.

Low ridges full of desirable sagebrush that we did not want burned. Ridges with patches of exotic cheatgrass that will probably explode after the fire, a weedy grass you never want to burn.

The helicopter worked tirelessly, sucking water into its twin tanks from a small pond near where I parked, and then precisely dumping them on the firewurm.

And then it disappeared. Later I would learn there are several truckloads of firefighters that owe their lives to that chopper pilot, as the fire raced down two parallel ridges and cut off both avenues of escape out of the sandy canyon where they'd set basecamp. Only the pilot's steady dumps of water stopped the race on one ridge, allowing the crews to get out.

The other ridgeline fire jumped the creek and burned up into the sanddunes, which have been stable for decades, if not centuries, but are certain to start blowing in this summer's drought with no sage to protect them.

But with no water drops to hinder its spread, the fire continued west, cresting the ridge into the next valley.

While their "backfire" continued its creep down into the desert below.

As darkness settled, it was still advancing

On my way out I find two truckloads of men and boys from town, all watching the mountain burn.

"What's that going to do to our elk and sheep?" they ask.

Well, actually, the elk will love it. So long as it doesn't all come back in as cheatgrass. And the bighorn sheep, too.

But our deer? That's our deer winter range burning up over there, guys. And the nesting habitat for sage grouse.

This is not good.

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