BROADUS — Heading south on the Tongue River Road from Ashland, motorists roll along a dirt path that hugs the namesake waterway and cuts through pastures dotted with cows and horses.
Head south long enough, and the yellow and green pasture turns black; the fallout of the largest wildfire crews in Montana have responded to this year. While the Remington fire scorched cattle and infrastructure across three counties near the Wyoming border, bits of green were already starting to appear Thursday at the fire’s edge.
Hundreds of people had a stake in halting the Remington fire, which was likely sparked by lightning in northern Wyoming. Wind pushed those flames north and into public and private lands of Rosebud, Big Horn and Powder River counties. The damage was obvious, with cattle and property damage amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for ranchers. But those same ranchers immediately set to repairing their land and seeing what help their neighbors need.
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“The fire came at us at 40 miles an hour,” said Alan Lloyd, an 80-year-old Powder River County man who operates a ranch that’s well over 100 years old. “All we could do was get out of the way.”
Lloyd was one of dozens of people who packed into Broadus’s community center Thursday to get a briefing from state and agriculture officials regarding what resources were available to those like him who’d seen their property incinerated.
“We’re going to be alright,” Lloyd said. “The things that really matter are OK. The things we lost are just stuff . There’s monetary loss, yeah, but it’s just stuff .”
“The fire came at us at 40 miles an hour. All we could do was get out of the way.”
Alan Lloyd, a Powder River County rancher
On Aug. 22, emergency crews in Wyoming first took notice of the Remington fire, which started north of Lieter in Sheridan County. Within a day, high winds drove the fire north across the Montana border into Big Horn, Rosebud and Powder River counties. Within days, it was estimated to have reached roughly 130,000 acres, becoming the largest active wildfire in the state.
Raymond Ragsdale, fire chief for the Broadus Volunteer Fire Department, knew the fire was heading toward Powder River County well ahead of it crossing the Montana border. He and other volunteers battled the blaze as it cut through the county’s southwestern corner, chasing “42 miles fire,” he said.
“It feels like every two or three years we get a big one,” said Broadus Volunteer Fire Assistant Chief Clint Pederson, who was among those who assisted in suppressing the nearly 150,000-acre Richard Springs fire in 2021. Historic wildfires burning in northern Wyoming have resulted in Broadus’s fire crew heading south to assist four times so far this year. Most recently, the volunteer firefighting team was in the Bitter Creek area of north eastern Wyoming to help suppress the Silver Spoon fire.
Also assisting in the massive response to the Remington fire were crews with the Bureau of Land Management, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Bureau of Indian Affairs firefighters and ranchers in the region with their own water trucks.
“We work very well with BLM and DNRC,” Ragsdale said. “Without them, we would really struggle. We help them, they help us.”
The Remington fire tore through some of the most sparsely populated country in the state, but the region was far from empty. In its path were thousands of heads of cattle and mile after mile of fence. As the fire raged, emergency agencies put entire towns on call for evacuation.
In Birney, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, residents were told to leave as flames crested the hills to the southeast. Those who fled spent the night in Lame Deer at the Boys and Girls Club. The fire made it right up to berms formed on the eastern side of Tongue River Road. In total, 196,368 acres burned.
As of Friday, crews had the fire 88% contained and the Incident Management Team assigned to the fire was preparing to demobilize the following day.
“I don’t know if it could have even went better, realistically,” said Angel Lei at the roundtable discussion Thursday, in which Gov. Greg Gianforte was among the participants.
Lei, a Northern Cheyenne woman with over two decades of experience in working in fire management, heads the Northern Cheyenne Disaster and Emergency Services and also serves on the State Emergency Response Commission. She mobilized Northern Cheyenne’s firefighters once the fire was just across the river from Birney. Tribal fire management is trying to be more proactive in the wake of fires like the Richard Springs fire that threatened Lame Deer years prior, Lei said.
The efforts of firefighters near Birney were still visible along Tongue River Road, where the tread marks from graders were still visible on Thursday.
In Montana, agriculture is still the state’s most lucrative industry. A 2022 study showed crop and animal production having a combined value of about $4.6 billion, according to Montana’s Department of Agriculture. In a state with more cows than people, about two-thirds of Montana’s land dedicated to agriculture is utilized for range and pastures. In the Texas Panhandle, wildfires burning earlier this year during an unseasonable warm calving season wiped out thousands of cattle, according to reporting from the Associated Press.
The Montana counties hit by the Remington fire are home to ranches containing roughly 224,000 head of cattle. As of Friday, ranchers were still scouring their properties, looking for cattle that got loose or got burned. During Thursday’s roundtable, ranch operators were advised to do their best in documenting all the cattle lost. A Farm Service Agency official acknowledged that it’s tough to spot a branding on a charred skeleton.
At a ranch in Otter, southeast of Birney, the Remington fire came right to the edge of the home of Suzie and Jae Notti. After working their ranch for decades, the Nottis had seen fires before, but their grader, pumper and hoses weren’t enough to hold back the Remington fire. The fire killed horses and cattle on their land, and destroyed over 105 miles of fences. With the exception of their houses, every bit of their personal land was burned, Suzie Nottie said.
“I’ve ridden just about every single day since then,” she said, “getting cattle back and getting hay to them.”
The Nottis are still in the process of documenting the total damage to their operation, but in the past two weeks those efforts have been bolstered by support in the form of care packages shipped from as far away as Idaho, and shipments of hay and fencing from closer neighbors.
When the first semi-load of hay showed up at their property after the fire, Suzie Nottie said they asked the driver to take it to the Lloyds who probably needed it more. Later that same day, the driver showed back up with the hay, saying the Lloyds figured the Notties needed it more.
Several programs were highlighted during Thursday’s meeting which offered financial assistance, tax breaks and resources such as fencing for impacted ranchers. One program that interested Jae Notti, who attended the roundtable discussion, was a deferred payment program for pasture grazing.
“We’re not going to be able to graze on any of the burned area next year,” he said.
A comprehensive list of programs available to those impacted by the fire, along with portals for those interested in making donations, is available at https://mtbeeffoundation.org/.
Nationally, around 34,000 wildfires have torched about 6,500,000 acres this year, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. Over the past 10 years, an annual average of 42,206 fires have burned 5,187,753 acres. The NIFC published a forecast for September that had most of Idaho, southern Montana and northern Wyoming having above-normal potential for significant wildfires.
