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.
An August 1949 photo shows the scope of the Mann Gulch fire near Helena, which took the lives of 12 smokejumpers and a forest ranger when a wall of flame raced up a steep hillside. The lightning-caused blaze burned more than 3,000 acres and controlling it required the efforts of more than 400 firefighters.
“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.”
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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
