![]() The author and his father trade their bows for rifles. In a few hours most of it would be on fire. A deck off the upstairs master bedroom looked out over the property-the old barn and bunkhouse, the chicken coop, and the timbered mountainside beyond. There were three ground-floor bedrooms and a patio. The vaulted living room housed a fifteen-foot Christmas tree every year. The large flagstone floor was warmed by a grid of hot-water pipes, the water heated by a large stone fireplace. In the end, the house was a grand achievement. He would usually run out and throw a couple more up before bed. After Ron, my dad, got home from work, we all would come out to watch him put a log on the structure before supper. It was an upgrade from the cramped two-bedroom cabin that he had previously shared with his wife and their five kids-my brothers and sisters and me. A moat of wet grass might not stop a forest fire from sending a fusillade of burning embers the size of fists onto the cedar-shake roof of his log home, Ron figured, but it could keep the flames from running up to the front door.Īs for the house, Ron had assembled it himself some thirty years before, buying and hauling the logs with his truck and having them coped and notched at a log-home outfit in the nearby Bitterroot Valley. The pasture that ran up to the two-lane highway was likewise getting a good soak from large sprinklers on rebar tripods. He'd been watering constantly for the past few days. Ron eyed the tobacco tinge in the sky as he moved the sprinklers to another part of the yard. "We'll wait until the ash is falling," he said. And though he wasn't complacent about wildfire, he felt calm here. Ron's wife, Jan, wanted to pack up and be ready to skedaddle. Eventually, the two would combine into an inferno that would burn ten thousand acres, driven by forty- to fifty-mile-per-hour winds. Another small fire, the "Schoolhouse," had started downstream. For two days it had fed on the fuel of dry grass, understory, and deadfall as it made its way toward them. The blaze, which would come to be known officially as the West Fork II fire, was close. This time, however, there'd been a lightning strike somewhere above the stretch of residences on Lolo Creek where Ron and his neighbors lived. Blowups as far away as Canada or Idaho can waft hundreds of miles, haze a Montana day, and make a mountain valley smell like a campsite. There's no such thing as a western Montana summer without the smell of a forest fire. It seems that those trail reviewers of a few years ago had not simply been starry-eyed hikers.Ron Henderson could smell smoke as he walked out to his pickup on a Monday morning in the summer of 2013, but he was not alarmed. But there was no denying that this vantage point on Keene Valley and the surrounding mountains was especially favourable The various peaks were arrayed in a particularly aesthetic way across in front of us. No doubt all these happenstances contributed to the views. And the fact that the peaks had a nice white coating of snow on their upper reaches. And the fact that it was a clear, blue, cloudless day. Now, there's no doubt that we had arrived at a particularly favorable time - late in the day, with the sunlight slanting in from the west. Attractive Keene Valley was directly below us to the south, and backing that, the prominent asymmetric peak of Noonmark and its lower sibling, Round Mountain. Presented before us was a truly fantastic view, encompassing Giant Mountain on the left, all the way across to Mount Dix, Dial, and Nippletop. Perhaps 30 second's walk beyond the summit, we arrived at an open south-facing set of ledges.
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