Horse Gulch Fire Update

Today, the Horse Gulch fire (just northeast of my house) is six days old. As of yesterday, the fire had burned through over 12,000 acres of timber and scrub. At present, the fire is 0% contained and is clawing into a rugged swath of the Big Belt Mountains.

Wildfires in Montana can be as confounding and as weird as our weather. A change in wind and weather conditions can quickly alter a fire’s direction or cause a fire to blow up in only a few minutes. Rolling flames can travel up to 14 miles an hour and consume many thousands of acres in a single day. When wildfires blow up, they actually create their own weather, which comes replete with billowing clouds and swirling winds at all levels.

A fire such as Horse Gulch can potentially have hotspots burning all the way into the fall months. Some fires may continue fizzling along until blanketed with heavy snow. Sometimes, stranger things may happen. On occasion, a fire will linger under the snow by smoldering underground while slowly nibbling away at the roots of trees. In the summer of 1991, a range fire swept over the parched grasslands south of Chinook, Montana, burning hundreds of thousands of acres in a matter of days. In the years following the fire, the rangeland greened and recovered. Cattle again dotted the break-and-begin plain. Yet, five years later, fire crews were still trying to douse the fire where it had crept into an exposed coal seam, burrowed in, and remained burning underground.

I hope for something quicker with this fire.

A Fire Map Capture as of Yesterday

—Mitchell Hegman