2007 fires scorched more than 400,000 acres

As the summer of 2007 evolved, so did the conditions for a big fire season in Montana: days and weeks without rain, consistently high temperatures and consecutive days of extremely low relative humidities.

July turned out to be the hottest month in the Flathead Valley since record-keeping began more than a century ago.

There were 21 days above 90 degrees, including 11 above 95 degrees — and only 0.6 inches of precipitation.

All that was needed to set the fire season off and running were ignitions. And they came, one after another, particularly in Northwest Montana.

The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, totaled up big numbers for Montana’s 2007 fire season:

A total of 1,871 wildland fires burning 811,598 acres; 364 prescribed fires covering 30,440 acres; and 25 wildland use fires burning 44,402 acres, with most of the latter activity occurring in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

In Northwest Montana and the Rocky Mountain Front alone, almost 400,000 acres burned.

For Northwest Montana, the season’s first significant fire started July 23 in heavy timber on the Flathead National Forest near Marias Pass, but eventually burned across open range on the Blackfeet Reservation, at times threatening scattered homes and the town of East Glacier.

The Skyland Fire eventually covered 45,760 acres.

The season’s largest fire emerged in the Salish Mountains north of Hot Springs on July 31. The Chippy Creek Fire proved difficult to corral, growing for several weeks to almost 100,000 acres on state, tribal, federal and Plum Creek Timber Co. lands.

The Brush Creek Fire got a lot of attention in the Flathead Valley. It started July 26 about 20 miles west of Whitefish, frequently putting off smoke plumes as it made rapid runs toward structures in the Star Meadow area, and later threatened homes in the Good Creek drainage.

The fire ended up covering 30,000 acres, but the Forest Service acknowledges that a fortunate change in weather helped stop the fire from burning into Good Creek, where it almost certainly would have grown exponentially, destroying structures along the way.

Other large fires cropped up across Western Montana, including the Jocko Lakes Fire, which burned more than 36,000 acres, at one point prompting the evacuation of hundreds of residents in the Seeley Lake area and directly threatening the town. It was the top priority fire in the United States for several days.

It was an exceptionally active year in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, with two immense fires escaping wilderness boundaries east of the Continental Divide — the 52,500-acre Ahorn Fire and the 60,000-acre Fool Creek Fire — and a series of smaller fires burning within wilderness boundaries.

Most fires in the region remained active well into September, when they were quieted by higher humidities, lower temperatures and the first traces of rain in weeks.

Long after the fires were out, dry conditions continued in Northwest Montana. As 2007 drew to a close, the Flathead Valley was almost 6 inches behind normal precipitation for the year.