The Mann Gulch fire was a wildfire started on August 5, 1949, in the Gates of the Mountain Wild Area, now named the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, in Helena National Forest, in western Montana. A team of 15 smokejumpers parachuted in that afternoon. After joining up with a firefighter already on the ground, the 16 men were headed downhill to the river as a safe refuge because of increasing fire activity on the opposite, north-facing slope, but could not see for a time that the fire had spotted in front of them and had cut off their escape route, forcing them to turn back, uphill. The fire, meanwhile, began advancing on them rapidly, driven by up-gulch winds, and accelerated by the dry grass on the south-facing slope. Wind, slope, and fine fuel caused the fire to advance faster than they could retreat, and they were overrun. 12 smokejumpers and a ground-based firefighter were fatally burned. Two escaped unharmed by running up the fall line to a rock ridge where they found a crack through which they escaped. The foreman, Wagner Dodge, survived not by outrunning the fire, but by lighting an emergency backfire now known as an escape fire and jumping into the burned area, lying face down in the black while the main fire joined and passed around his flame front. He had ordered his men to follow but they refused and ran.
The United States Forest Service drew lessons from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire by designing new training techniques and safety measures that developed how the agency approached wildfire suppression and emergency management. The agency also increased emphasis on fire research and the science of fire behavior.
University of Chicago English professor and author Norman Maclean (1902–1990) researched the fire and its behavior for his posthumously published book Young Men and Fire (1992). Maclean, who had worked in northwestern Montana logging camps and for the Forest Service in his youth, recounted the events of the fire and ensuing tragedy and undertook an investigation of the fire's causes. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1992. The 1952 film Red Skies of Montana, starring actor Richard Widmark and directed by Joseph M. Newman, was loosely based on the events of the Mann Gulch fire.
The location of the Mann Gulch fire was added as a historical district to the United States National Register of Historic Places on May 19, 1999. A sign is placed near Mann Gulch to memorialize the tragedy, and can be seen from the waters of the nearby Missouri River.
The fire
The fire started when lightning struck south of Mann Gulch, a tributary of the Missouri River that cuts through steep terrain for approximately five miles (8 km) in the Gates of the Mountains, The place was noted and named by Lewis and Clark on their journey west in 1805. The fire was spotted by forest ranger James O. Harrison around noon on August 5, 1949. Harrison, a college student at Montana State University, was working the summer as recreation and fire prevention guard for the Meriwether Canyon Campground. He had been a smokejumper the previous year but had given it up because of the danger. As a ranger, he still had a responsibility to watch for and help fight fires, but it was not his primary role. On this day, he fought the fire on his own for four hours before he met the crew of smokejumpers who had been dispatched from Hale Field, Missoula, Montana, in a Douglas DC-3.
Contributing factors
Several factors that combined to create the disaster are described in Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire.
- Steep Slope – Fire spreads faster up a slope, and the south facing slope north of Mann Gulch was up to 76% along the fall line. However, the slope along the path of travel was 18% on average.
- Fuel – Fire spreads fast in dry grass. The south facing slope of Mann Gulch was mostly knee high cheatgrass, an especially volatile fuel. Additionally, the burn-over incident occurred on a hot day, on a south-facing slope, in the early afternoon. All of these factors would have contributed to the volatility of the fire, as they would have decreased fuel moisture
- Communication – The crew's single radio broke because its parachute failed to open. It could have possibly prevented the disaster or helped get aid more quickly to the two burned men who died later. There were other dangerous fires going on at the same time and without radio contact, Forest Service leaders did not know what was happening on Mann Gulch.
- Weather – The season was very dry and that day was extremely hot. Winds in the Gulch were also strong "up gulch," the same direction in which the men tried to run.
Airplane
The C-47/DC-3 "Miss Montana" (a name applied during the eventual restoration, not used at the time of the fire and use by Johnson), registration number NC24320, was the only smokejumper plane available at Hale Field, near the current location of Sentinel High School, on August 5, 1949, when the call came in seeking 25 smokejumpers to fight a blaze in a hard-to-reach area of the Helena National Forest. The C-47/DC-3 could only hold 16 jumpers and their equipment. Even though more help was needed, fire bosses decided not to wait for a second plane, and instead sent No. NC24320 out on its own. NC24320 flew with Johnson Flying Service from Hale Field in Missoula, Montana and was used to drop smokejumpers as well as for other operations for which Johnson Flying Service held contracts. “Miss Montana” has since been restored to airworthy condition and still flies out of Missoula.
Incident
It was hot, with a temperature of 97 °F (36 °C), and the fire danger rating was high, rated 74 out of a possible 100. Wind conditions were turbulent. The plane flight was especially rough. One smokejumper got sick on the way and did not jump, returning with the airplane to Hale Field. Getting off the plane, he resigned from the smokejumpers. The remaining 15 smokejumpers parachuted into an open area at the top of the gulch. Below them, they could see the fire burning on the ridge south of Mann Gulch toward the Missouri River. Gear and individual jumpers were scattered widely due to the turbulent conditions. Their radio was destroyed after its parachute failed to open. After the smokejumpers had landed, a shout was heard coming from the front of the fire. The foreman, Wagner "Wag" Dodge, went out ahead to find the person shouting and to scout the fire. He left instructions for the team to finish gathering their equipment and eat, and then advance to the front of the fire. The voice turned out to be Jim Harrison who had already been fighting the fire alone for four hours.
The two headed back up the gulch, and Dodge noted that one could not get closer than 100 feet (30 m) to the fire due to the heat. The crew met Dodge and Harrison about halfway to the fire. Dodge instructed the team to move off the front of the fire, and instead "sidehill" (keeping to the same contour or elevation), and cross over to the thinly forested and grass-covered south-facing slope, north of the stream, where they would move "down gulch" (west towards the confluence between Mann Gulch and the Missouri River). They could then fight the fire from the flank and steer it toward a low-fuel area. Dodge returned with Harrison to the supply area at the top of the gulch. The two stopped there to eat. From the high vantage point, Dodge noticed the smoke along the fire front boiling up, indicating an intensification of the heat of the fire. He and Harrison headed down the gulch to catch up with the crew.
"Blow up"
By the time Dodge reached his men, the fire west of them, down-gulch toward the Missouri River, had already jumped from the ridge south of Mann Gulch to the bottom of the south facing slope north of the stream. The intense heat, combined with wind coming off the river, and the upslope direction of the burn (which pre-dries and heats the fuel, and leads to much faster fire movement when a fire is burning up-slope) pushed the flames up the gulch in the dry grass of the south facing slope, causing what fire fighters call a "blow up". Various side ridges running down the slope obscured the crew's view, so they could not see the conditions further down the gulch, and they initially continued to move toward the fire. When Dodge finally got a glimpse of what was happening, he turned the men around and started them angling back up upslope and up the gulch. Within a couple hundred yards, he ordered the men to drop their Pulaskis, shovels, and crosscut saws:
Dodge's order was to throw away just their packs and heavy tools, but to his surprise some of them had already thrown away all of their heavy equipment. On the other hand, some of them wouldn't abandon their heavy tools, even after Dodge's order. Diettert, one of the most intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with him, took his shovel and leaned it against a pine tree. Just a little further on, Rumsey and Sallee passed the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted. He was sitting with his heavy pack on and was making no effort to take it off.
By this point, the fire was moving extremely quickly up the 76% incline of the northern slope (37 degree slope) of Mann Gulch, and Dodge realized they would not be able to make the ridge line in front of the fire. With the fire less than 100 yards (90 m) behind, he took a match out and set fire to the grass in front of them. In doing so, he was attempting to create an escape fire to lie in so that, deprived of fuel, the main fire would pass the new, burned-out clearing and divert around him and his crew. In the back draft of the main fire, the grass fire Dodge had set burned in the direction toward the ridge above. Turning to the three men by him — Robert Sallee, Walter Rumsey, and Eldon Diettert — Dodge said, "Up this way," but the men misunderstood him. The three ran straight up for the ridge crest, moving up along the far edge of Dodge's fire. Sallee later said he was not sure what Dodge was doing, and thought perhaps he intended the fire to act as a buffer between the men and the main fire. It was not until he got to the ridge crest and looked back down that he realized what Dodge had intended. As the rest of the crew came up, Dodge tried to direct them through the fire he had set and into the center burnt out area. Dodge later stated that someone, possibly squad leader William Hellman, said, "To hell with that, I'm getting out of here." The rest of the team raced past Dodge up the slope toward the hogback of Mann Gulch ridge, hoping they had enough time to get through the rock ridge line to safer ground on the other side. Only Dodge entered the burned-out area of his escape fire.
Four of the men reached the ridge crest, but only two, Bob Sallee and Walter Rumsey, managed to escape through a crevice or deep fissure in the rock ridge to reach the other side. In the dense smoke of the fire, the two had no way of knowing if the crevice they found actually "went through" to the other side or would be a blind trap. Diettert had been just to the right, slightly upgulch of Sallee and Rumsey, but he did not drop back to the crevice and continued on up the right side of the hogback. He did not find another escape route and was overtaken by the fire. Sallee and Rumsey came through the hogback to the ridge crest above what became known as Rescue Gulch. Dropping down off the ridge, they managed to find a rock slide with little to no vegetation. They waited there for the fire to overtake them, moving from the bottom of the slide to the top as the fire moved past. Hellman was caught by the fire on the top of the ridge and was badly burned. Though he and Joseph Sylvia initially survived the fire, they suffered heavy injuries and both died in the hospital the next day. Wag Dodge entered the charred center of the escape fire he had built and survived the intensely burning main fire.
In Young Men and Fire, Maclean stated that when the fire passed over Dodge's position, "he was lifted off the ground two or three times." Later researchers repeated the claim. However, this statement was an exaggeration. Dodge actually wrote, in his statement to the board of review, "There were three extreme gusts of hot air that almost lifted me from the ground as the fire passed over." In another description of Dodge's ordeal, John Maclean said, "as the main fire passed, it [the fire] picked him up and shook him like a dog with a bone." Young Men and Fire attributed the story to Earl Cooley, the spotter and kicker aboard the airplane, who had rebuffed Maclean's overture to collaborate and proceeded to publish his own book. But the mistaken story actually originated with C. E. "Mike" Hardy, who was the head of the litter bearers collecting the bodies the day after the disaster, and spoke with Dodge then as they sat on a log. Rothermel, in the early 1990s and Alexander in 2009 cite separate personal communications with Hardy asserting this account. Hardy assisted Norman Maclean in his research and accompanied him on a trip to the site.
Four-hundred-and-fifty men fought for five more days to get the fire under control, which had spread to 4,500 acres (1,800 ha).
Timeline
The events described above all transpired in a relatively short period of time. Studies estimated that the fire covered 3,000 acres in 10 minutes during this blow-up stage, an hour and 45 minutes after the smokejumpers had arrived.
- 4:10 pm : All crew jumped.
- 5:00 pm :The scattered cargo had been gathered.
- 5:45 pm : The crew had seen the fire coming up towards them on the south-facing slope north of the stream and had turned to run.
- 5:55 pm: The fire had swept over them. The time at which the fire engulfed the men was judged by the melted hands on Harrison's pocket-watch, frozen at 5:56 pm by the intense heat.
Casualties
Thirteen firefighters died, with eleven killed in the fire and two—Hellman and Sylvia—who sustained fatal burns and died later in the hospital. Only three of the sixteen survived.