It’s a common refrain across the West each summer, echoing through hotel lobbies, cafes, bike shops and gear stores: “Where’s all this smoke coming from?”
A fire — maybe near, maybe far — clouds Montana’s Big Sky and leaves visitors wondering whether their plans are ruined, or whether they should cancel their trip to the state altogether. Is it safe to recreate outside? Will they see anything? Is Glacier National Park even open?
Western Montana’s Glacier Country — the state’s official tourism organization for Ravalli, Missoula, Lake, Sanders, Mineral, Lincoln, Flathead and Glacier counties — hopes to help frontline tourism and hospitality workers answer those questions with a new educational initiative branded “Don’t Add Fuel to the Fire.” The free 20-minute online course advises workers who interact with visitors to Montana on where to find accurate and detailed information about wildfires and smoke, and how to relay that to the public.
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Often, the course stresses, Montana’s vaunted public lands and recreation opportunities remain mostly open to visitors, even when social media is flooded with photos of billowing infernos.
Lucy Beighle, director of communications for Western Montana’s Glacier Country, said the initiative was partly inspired by frustration over viral social media posts about Montana wildfires that included dramatic images and taglines like #PrayForMontana. The posts, she said, implied that aggressive fires were bearing down on communities statewide, “which of course was never true. It was a fire in the Bob Marshall (Wilderness Complex), or something. It was something that is part of our natural ecology.”
“Sometimes when there are fires or smoke in Montana, the reaction that people have on a local basis … can worsen the situation for our businesses that depend on sometimes a very short season for their livelihood,” she said. “People were cancelling reservations when really the smoke and fire were fairly negligible.”
Through the course and other digital and print materials, Western Montana’s Glacier Country is advising frontline workers to bring a more nuanced approach to explaining smoke and fire than simply, “the whole state’s on fire.”
Beighle noted that many workers, like the visitors they serve, are in Montana seasonally and may be new to the state. When smoke rolls in or there’s a fire nearby, “they either don’t know or they get caught up in the drama of it.”
The move to combat fire and smoke’s negative impacts on tourism comes as wildfires hurt the West’s residents with repeated seasons of unhealthy air and home insurer pull-outs due to fire risk.
The online course and accompanying printable tip sheet advises workers, “State the facts only; do not make any assumptions” and “avoid drama.” It also provides links to reliable and up-to-date wildfire information sources, such as the U.S. Forest Service and state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. For smoke info, workers can check with the state Department of Environmental Quality, the course advises.
In addition to basic wildfire prevention info, the course focuses heavily on the specificity and context of the information workers relay to visitors — understanding and relaying what exactly is closed and is open; what activities fire restrictions prohibit and where they’re in effect; where exactly a fire is located and how big it is; and where exactly smoke is coming from. Often, Beighle said, thick smoke in Montana doesn’t mean there are large fires here. Last year the state was inundated with smoke from fires in northern Alberta, Canada.
A wildfire may burn thousands or tens of thousands of acres in Montana, the course noted. But the state covers 93 million acres, most of which will be unaffected. Most fires in Glacier National Park, for example, affect only a sliver of the park’s more than 1 million acres.
When fire does close an area or smoke makes outdoor recreation unhealthy, the course advises, workers should be able to direct visitors to other nearby recreation locations or indoor activities like dining, galleries or museums.
“We don’t say, ‘Oh, this part of Montana is closed,'” Beighle explained. “We say, ‘This part is temporarily closed for this reason, and these parts are open.’ We stressed what’s open rather than what’s closed, and that helps with people cancelling their reservations as well.”
Joshua Murdock covers the outdoors and natural resources for the Missoulian. He previously served as editor-in-chief of The Boulder Monitor in Jefferson County, Montana, and has worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer in rural towns in Idaho and Utah.