...And There's Fire on the Mountain...

We got an early wake up call this morning at 5:30. Since Tim is the fire chief and an EMT he was expecting it to be an emergency call at that hour, so he was headin' to the door! It was a fire call, but it was my mom calling to tell us there was a tremendous fire north of them. She said dad had gotten up at 1:30 to go to the bathroom and looked out the window and could see huge flames. They couldn't tell where it was located, thinking it was just over the hill from them. They called it in and took off to see what they could find. It was such a jaw-dropping line of fire. Apparently it had started north of Geyser. The winds were gusting upwards of probably 70 mph, and it didn't take it long to spread. It burned rapidly to the east, burning Round Butte, over onto Square Butte and continuing on east for who knows how far. It had burned down into the breaks and was following that line. We are talking probably at least 20 miles. They had fire crews responding from Raynesford, Geyser, Stanford, Windham, Denton, Coffee Creek, Geraldine and Fort Benton. Since we were wide awake at that point, we hopped in the car and headed out. Normally you can see Square Butte almost the whole trip from Judith Gap and Stanford, so we thought we would be able to see it once we got on the road, but the smoke was so incredibly thick there we couldn't see anything until we got to Stanford. By the time we got there, things had died down quite a bit, but you could see plenty of hotspots as far as you could see. At about 7:30, we started making sandwiches to take to the crews that were on standby. There were several trucks stationed at the Junction of Hwy 80 N. and MT. Hwy 81, which is where the turnoff for Denton meets the highway going north to Geraldine. It looked as if the fire had burned to within about a mile of the highway there. It was a concern that if the wind had swithced and blown south that so many homes would be in danger, my parents included. They did have people in Geyser alerted. It was reported that the fire had burned an estimated 18,000 to 20,000 acres. There were about 13 haystacks that were lost, about 200 tons/stack. And it was also reported that someone in Choteau county may have lost some cattle. But to think of that much acreage that it had covered, no homes were lost. What a blessing.