This weekend, Helena is honoring the 13 people who died in the infamous Mann Gulch fire 75 years ago.
The fire was Aug. 5, 1949, just 20 miles north of Helena in the Gates of the Mountain Wilderness, after a lightning strike.
It was a hot and windy day, and the fire was crawling in the steep rocks. Roadless terrain meant smokejumpers, specially trained wildland firefighters who could parachute into a fire, needed to be called in.
A crew from Missoula responded, and although the response looked routine, turbulence scattered the crew’s gear and broke its radio.
“I took a look at the fire and decided it wasn’t bad,” a surviving crew member said in the analysis Mann Gulch Fire: A Race That Couldn’t Be Won. “It was burning on top of the ridge and I thought it would continue on up the ridge.”
People are also reading…
But as the crew gathered the supplies, high winds swept the fire and cut off the crew’s path.
The smokejumpers tried to escape up the hill, but the blaze followed at a devastating pace, spreading 3,000 acres in just 10 minutes. That’s about 5 acres per second.
Crew foreman R. Wagner “Wag” Dodge knew there was no way to outrun the fire, so he tried something unprecedented: he set a new fire and hid in the burned land. His hope was that the fire would burn around the fuelless soot and spare him — and it worked.
He yelled for the crew to join him, but in the chaos, no one did. Two other smokejumpers…
It was and is one of the most well-known fire disasters in history. Music and art would be inspired by it, including the 1992 nonfiction book “Young Men and Fire” by Norman Maclean, who also wrote “A River Runs Through It.”
…
The Montana Discovery
Your Trusted Source for Accurate and Timely Updates!
