Glacier fire containment holding steady

The Reynolds Creek Fire, burning through nearly 4,000 acres on the east side of Glacier National Park, is holding steady at about two-thirds containment, and fire officials say that number likely won’t move up too much as crews continue to gain control over the blaze.

“When we talk about containment, we usually talk about where we can build fire line, and on this fire you have so much rock on the north side that the fire’s burned up into,” information officer Mike Cole said Monday, referring to the flame fronts slowly moving up Rose and Baring creeks. “I would imagine this would never show full containment, just because of those fingers of fire burning up in those drainages.”

Helicopters may dump water onto wooden footbridges spanning the two creeks, should the burn area advance that far. Because of the conditions on the ground, fire managers are opting to monitor those slow-moving burns without dropping ground crews in to build additional fire lines.

“It’s not a place we can put crews into, because of the terrain and the fuels there. One thing you want is to make sure you can always see the fire, and when you have crews in a place where they can’t see the fire front, that’s a pretty big ‘watch out’ situation,” Cole said.

Ground crews are instead focusing on “values at risk,” such as Going-to-the-Sun Road and the Rising Sun Campground and Motor Inn.

“You have to decide those priorities and what’s at risk before you put firefighters into a place,” Cole said.

A new incident commander, Chris Young, took over firefighting operations Monday night as some resources were being redeployed to more volatile blazes flaring up elsewhere in the country. Cole said that by Tuesday afternoon the west side of the fire was edging closer to full containment, and ground crews were nearing completion on a 100-foot buffer inside the fire line.

A weak storm system on Monday night also helped to lift an inversion that had trapped dense smoke in the valley around St. Mary Lake, providing helicopter crews with the visibility needed to resume water and cargo drops Tuesday.

Still, the smoke billowing eastward from wildfires including the fast-growing Wolverine Fire in North-central Washington could continue to plague the region, pending a larger-scale shift in weather patterns. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality continued to issue air-quality alerts throughout the western half of the state on Tuesday due to high smoke in the area, and expected those conditions to continue into today.

By late Tuesday afternoon, the Wolverine Fire was reported at 25,634 acres, a nearly 10,000-acre increase over Monday’s estimated acreage.

Reporter Samuel Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.