Backyard Infernos

By Walter Kirn/Pinesdale

As the Pinesdale, Mont., volunteer fire department sprayed foam on the roof of his mother-in-law's new house, the man grabbed a baby picture off the refrigerator door and a few Mormon Scriptures from a shelf. There was no time to rescue larger items. The fires whirling down the mountain were just too near, filling the air with flurries of black cinders and sending up tall cliffs of orange flame. Overhead a massive Sikorsky helicopter dumped water into the smoke, but the time to stand and fight had passed. The man jumped into his truck and raced away, followed by the fire crew, which retreated half a mile downhill just in time to escape a freakish fire tornado 200 ft. high and headed for the town center.

The combination of a mild winter, a broiling summer and outbreaks of dry thunderstorms that have produced much lightning but little rain has plagued Montana and neighboring states with fires of a ferocity not seen for half a century. From the central mountains to the western valleys, more than 50 homes have burned as well as 300,000 acres (and counting) of kindling-dry timber. Besides forcing thousands to evacuate, the flames brought down power lines and melted cars and trucks. Last week 6 million acres of public land were closed to civilians by order of the Governor, and each day new crews of fire fighters arrive, to be housed in tent cities that look like refugee camps.

Worst hit has been the Bitterroot Valley, where the skies glow red all night and the smoke on the highways forces vehicles to travel in convoys behind pilot cars. Paul Chamberlain of the U.S. Forest Service, deputy operations chief assigned to the raging valley complex fire, has never seen anything like this disaster. "Many of you have been fighting fires for a long time and haven't ever witnessed a fire event like yesterday," Chamberlain told his tired troops. "You may never witness another one in your whole career." What complicates the fire fighters' job is that the picturesque valley, like so much of the West, is adding population rapidly, creating what's called an "urban interface" of sometimes palatial homes tucked high among the trees. "Forest fire" is a misnomer: the Bitterroot fires are village fires, backyard fires.

In such a setting, containing the blazes is not a priority, nor is it even practical. "As it is," says Steve Frye, incident commander for the valley complex, "we have only enough resources to protect homes and property." Given the flames' unpredictable behavior, providing a heat shield is often impossible, and even under good conditions it can require novel, high-risk tactics. "We are going into situations that, absent homes and property, we wouldn't be putting fire fighters into," says Frye. Now and then rugged cabin dwellers tell Frye they don't expect the Federal Government to defend their dwellings, but when the flames reach their door, Frye says, such proud individualists always change their tune.

Forrest Hayes, a retired district ranger for the Forest Service, stands in a park in the town of Darby (pop. 940) and points to a large map he has posted, updating residents on the fire's progress and comforting the frightened and displaced. Hayes too is outraged at the steady intrusion of humans into fire's natural domain. "Realtors advertise 20-acre lots next to national forest land," says Hayes. And while homeowners may be willing to gamble that their places won't burn, what they don't have a right to expect, say critics, is that fire fighters will risk their lives defending poorly situated property. Says Hayes: "They build houses in places that are extremely difficult to protect--up one-lane roads where fire trucks have a hard time."

In tiny Pinesdale (pop. 800), the 20-man fire department has no choice but to face the flames close up. What is at stake for them is more than a few houses, a school and a general store; it's a way of life. A community of fundamentalist Mormons, many of whom are practicing polygamists, Pinesdale is unusually tight knit, and its residents tend to be relatives--close relatives. When the firehouse siren called volunteers to battle a mid-afternoon inferno, the men who showed up in mismatched boots and helmets were brothers, cousins and uncles. "It's a little department, all family, kind of," said Fred Siphakis, ex-chief of the department, as he hosed down a local home with his small crew. Just then Darren Jessop, Siphakis's son-in-law, came jogging up the dirt road from his home, his hands full of tomatoes from the garden. "Those will be fried green tomatoes," joked a comrade. The flames, just a few hundred yards away by then and burning hotter than 2,000[degrees] F, had already scorched what another Jessop, Jake, calls "our mountain, the old stomping grounds."

With the help of other local departments, a last-minute change in the wind and nonstop prayer, Pinesdale came through that day--barely. One house burned. Melted metal lay in piles around a charred truck. Blackened apples littered the ground. At a house just yards away, melted rain gutters dangled from the roof. Though Siphakis was grateful that the losses were light, he was bitter about federal prohibitions on logging that he believes aggravated the catastrophe. "They don't want to let us log Montana," he sighed. "They'd rather burn it."

As Montana and other states continue to blaze, there will be plenty of blame to go around, but none of it will stop the flames. Only the rain can do that, and the autumn snows. If they ever come.

For more photos and a first-person account by photographer Bill Campbell, visit time.com