Last night's lightning storms have firefighters around Helena, Missoula and Hamilton chasing reports of smoke and new fires in area forests. Eight new fire starts were reported north of Helena today, while evacuation orders were lifted for the North Hills fire, the largest fire burning in the area. Lightning near the south end of the Bitterroot National Forest last night has sparked a one-tenth acre fire west of Hamilton in the Canyon Creek drainage next to Blodgett Canyon.

A new fire has started roughly four miles south of Wise River in the Beaverhead National Forest. Officials are closely watching a small fire started by lightning last night in the south end of the Bitterroot National Forest. Southwest and a portion of central Montana are under a National Weather Service red flag warning through nine tonight.

Fire season is in full swing for Montana. A former Miles City high school athletic trainer who admitted to coercing boys into sexual abuse under the guise of improving their athletic performance has been sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. An 18-year-old girl from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation was declared missing today.

So far, the predicted high winds forecast for the Helena area have not materialized, making things a little easier for more than 300 firefighters battling the North Hills' fire about nine miles northeast of town. The latest update on the Beeskove fire just outside Missoula has it at 182 acres and 0% contained. Police in Medford, Oregon, say Montana authorities have found a body believed to be that of a missing Oregon child.

The incident commander on the wildfire burning about six miles north of Missoula says he’s bracing for some weather-related challenges this weekend. The Moss Ranch fire on the Flathead Indian Reservation has grown to 450-acres in a matter of days.

Two people are dead from gunshot wounds after a traffic stop and pursuit in Kalispell last night. Yellowstone National Park officials are urging visitors to properly store food amid a series of problems with black bears. The two-day-old Beeskove Fire in the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area north of Missoula grew from less than an acre to roughly 35 acres overnight.

Federal prosecutors are asking a Montana judge to sentence a former athletic trainer accused of sexually abusing Miles City high school children to 15 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Authorities say more than two dozen children who were removed from an alternative treatment center in northwest Montana are being interviewed as part of an investigation into allegations of physical and psychological abuse.

The Montana state health department has removed 27 children from the Ranch for Kids in Rexford citing “serious allegations of egregious, chronic, and persistent child abuse and neglect.” A lightning-caused fire was reported in the Rattlesnake recreation area North of Missoula.

Montana on average is looking pretty good for moisture this month, but the western part of the state is leaning slightly dry, while southeast Montana is on the moist side. Hazardous contaminants flowing down from Canadian mines have prompted Kootenai-River communities to seek stronger protections. Northcentral and southwest Montana are facing elevated fire danger this week, according to the National Weather Service.

A US appeals court panel has sided with the Trump administration, ruling that state and federal programs already in place ensure that mining companies take financial responsibility for future pollution cleanups. The tribes on the Fort Belknap Reservation declared a state of emergency this week over what the tribal president says is a suicide crisis. Montana’s elected officials are still reacting to a series of racist Tweets President Donald Trump posted last weekend urging a group of Democratic