Montana Wildfire News

After a wildfire , forest managers know that a forest can and will bounce back on its own. Still, the U.S. Forest Service doles out millions of dollars each year for post-burn restoration and rehabilitation.

A wildfire burning east of Medicine Lake in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest was discovered yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m. Forest officials estimate the Medicine Lake 2 Fire , located in the Pintler Ranger District, to be about 45 acres.

Salvage logging on a portion of the Rice Ridge Fire burn area near Seeley Lake is set to begin soon. The U.S. Forest Service is finalizing plans to log about 5,600 acres on the 160,000 acres that burned in the biggest wildfire Montana saw last summer. I recently visited the salvage logging site, about half a mile drive outside Seeley Lake, with Megan Fylling and Willaim Blake. They’re avian biologists, Fylling is with the University of Montana Bird Ecology Lab and Blake at MPG Ranch.

A weekend of lower temperature and higher humidity brought no substantial new wildfire starts across the state, and allowed firefighters to make a dent in existing blazes. Forecasters say to expect increasing fire danger and more smoke as the week progresses.

Mild weather unlikely to expand wildfires is expected this weekend, after a week of high temperatures, low humidity and a Red Flag Warning - or an indication that weather is ripe for wildfires to start and spread. That red flag warning for the western two-thirds of Montana is set to expire at midnight tonight.

The National Weather Service says fire-weather conditions now exist across much of Montana, with high temperatures, low humidity and strong wind gusts forecast through tomorrow. Red flag warnings are in effect.

A five-acre fire started around 4 p.m. Wednesday near Alberton. Lolo National Forest spokesperson Boyd Hartwig says the fire is burning mostly grass, and that it’s not yet known if the fire is human-caused.

Since Monday, one new fire has been discovered in the Kootenai National Forest. The Ten Mile Fire is burning 15 to 20 acres in the Rexford and Fortine Ranger Districts. That brings to 21 the number of lightning-caused fires discovered on the Kootenai since this weekend.

This year is the 30th anniversary of the fires that burned nearly half of Yellowstone National Park in 1988. They freaked a lot of people out. Media coverage at the time characterized the fires as causing unprecedented devastation and the destruction of park forests and wildlife habitat.

How devastating are wildfires to deer and elk? Can most of them outrun or outflank a rapidly spreading fire? And what about the survivors when they return to a burned forest? Isn’t their habitat destroyed?