Fire on the mountain
When fire danger is high, hikers turn into smoke-battling vigilantes

More frequent wildfires in the West can turn hiking through beautiful, high-elevation country into a dangerous game for hikers. In July, seven friends of mine from Idaho, Colorado, Washington and Montana took off for a week of backpacking in southwestern Montana. Everything went off without a hitch their first night. A rainstorm passed through, but it wasn’t a big deal.

When they woke up the next morning, they saw a plume of smoke rising into the sky. One of the hikers, Darren Wilson, had anticipated something like this, even before their trip began.

Zeke Lloyd

“It was in the back of my mind – ‘I hope we don’t hike into somewhere and get trapped by a fire,’” recalled Wilson, a Hamilton, Mont., resident.

They were hiking through the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness and knew it was under strict restrictions: No campfires, no exceptions. The summer had been dry and hot, and wildfires had been erupting throughout Montana.

But as the group continued hiking that day, they realized the trail of smoke ahead might be the early stage of a wildfire. 

The hikers weren’t trapped, but 200 yards from their destination of Hidden Lake, they came upon scorched earth surrounding a tree split down the middle, most likely from a lightning strike. Its bark was blackened and glowing, and beneath the tree the charred ground smoldered. The smoke they’d seen was seeping from hot charcoal and dry wood. 

“You could tell the tree torched and burned while it was standing and then cracked and fell on the ground,” Darren’s wife, Chelsie, an x-ray technologist with previous experience in wildland firefighting, said. 

“I think everyone had different feelings,” she said. “Those who had never seen forest fires before were panicking.”

The group put Chelsie in charge, and she laid out a two-step process: Some people would run to Hidden Lake to fill every water bottle and hydration pack. Everyone else would use the water to turn the smoldering dirt into mud. 

Chelsie and Brittney Erickson, another fellow hiker, poured water on dirt, using the wet earth to put out the fire bit by bit. Chelsie kicked a burning stump into the ground. The team smothered it. She instructed and delegated jobs, describing the team as willing, communicative and diligent. 

“It was really scary at first,” Chelsie said, “and then it became fun.” After two hours, she gave her team the all-clear. They had transformed the patch of smoldering char into a wet pile of dirt and debris. 

On a hike later the same day, the group climbed West Pintler Peak only to spot another fire, this one on the horizon some 10 miles away. They called in the sighting from a ridge with cell service and heard a plane fly low overhead the next day. Weeks later, they said they think that was the first alert to the Johnson Fire, a 270-acre blaze southwest of West Pintler Peak. 

If there was a theme to the hikers’ trip it was definitely fire, because while camping near the bank of Oreamnos Lake, they spotted wispy smoke billowing from the opposite shoreline. 

“We start yelling across the lake, top of our lungs,” Darren Wilson said. “‘Is there anybody there? Do you have a fire?’” Hearing no response, they initiated a then-familiar course of action. Gathering every container of water they possessed, the group rushed toward the smoke’s source. 

“Like children of the corn, we come out of the trees,” Wilson said, only to find three men huddled around a prohibited campfire. The hikers explained that they’d put out a smoldering wildfire, spotted another and were worried about a third – the campfire they were now looking at.

“The guys were not very impressed with us, though,” Chelsie Wilson said, as the men reluctantly extinguished their fire. “They didn’t like our story at all.” Still, they’d agreed to douse the fire and the hikers withdrew, hoping this was the end of fires popping up on their trek.

“It’s a real possibility,” Darren Wilson said. “You could be caught behind the wrong side of a fire.”

Zeke Lloyd is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Helena, Mont., and writes for the Montana Free Press.