Serving Southern Jefferson County in the Great State of Montana
Serving Southern Jefferson County in the Great State of Montana
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There's a small wooden cabin at the top of Northwest Peak, a few miles from Montana's borders with Idaho and Canada, and Chuck Manning, 79, believes lookouts like this one deserve a second chance at being useful. The fire lookout sits about 7,700 feet above sea level and seems in good condition despite being abandoned since 1955, when the Forest Service last staffed the outpost. Manning leads the Northwest Montana Lookout Association, a nonprofit group that supports government agencies in...
Fire season in Montana still has not ended. Thirty-five fires continue to burn across the state, though the combined acreage makes up a small amount of the total burned this season. A continued drought in the east will help maintain fire-prone conditions through early November, though Monday night brought precipitation and cooler temperatures to western Montana, according to Dan Zumpfe, a meteorologist based in Missoula for the National Weather Service. "Certainly for western Montana, it looks like we're going to be out of fire season, for the...
On Sept. 15, dry pine needles littered the forest floor, forming a beige blanket over charred soil. Insect chatter echoed through the woods while a woodpecker pounded the trunk of a scorched Douglas fir, scattering chips of charcoal. In mid-July, when the Horse Gulch Fire burned at its most intense, firefighters cut a perimeter along the timberline's edge, just beneath a ridge's saddle. Now, a narrow lane of overturned soil, evidence of firefighting bulldozers, separated blackened earth from...
On July 22, roughly 7.5% of NorthWestern Energy’s Montana customers received a message from the utility company about a potential power shutoff. The warning came both digitally and via mail to 30,000 energy consumers located in or adjacent to heavily forested areas of the state. “Our wildfire specialists have identified your property to be within a high‑risk area,” the email read. “Due to living in a high‑risk wildfire area, we want to help you prepare for service interruptions and public safety power shutoffs.” To many energy consumers, pu...
More frequent wildfires in the West can turn hiking through beautiful, high- elevation country into a dangerous game for hikers. In July, seven friends 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. But when they woke up, they saw a plume of smoke rising into the sky. Darren Wilson had anticipated something like this, even before...
