North Dakota

Fighting the Flames: North Dakota’s historic October wildfires, a mini-documentary

Published

1 year ago

December 14, 2024

Fighting the Flames: North Dakota’s historic October wildfires, a mini-documentary

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – Historic wildfires severely impacted parts of North Dakota throughout October. Here is a look back at what caused them and the impact they had.

The majority of the fires broke out on Saturday, October 5, when a powerful cold front produced 60 to near 80 miles per hour wind gusts with very dry air.

The Bear Den Fire prompted an evacuation for a small portion of the Fort Berthold Reservation and came close to the community of Mandaree. The fire, which was fully contained on October 20, burned about 13,500 acres.

The Elkhorn Fire burned about 10,300 acres across rugged terrain south of Watford City and was contained after 11 days.

Williams County was the hardest hit, where two large fires each traveled approximately 20 miles, crossing Highway 2, and burning almost 90,000 acres, especially impacting the communities of Ray and Tioga.

Many other fires occurred across the state that first weekend of October, and as conditions remained dry, more popped up during the middle of the month. That included fires that burned more than a thousand acres north of Bismarck near Double Ditch and an approximately thousand-acre fire near Medora.

“The combination of a number of factors really led to the extreme severity of these wildfires back in October. A combination of long-term drought, and we had a high wind event on top of that, that not only was a high wind event, but we had gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour. And very low relative humidity combined with all of that, led to the extreme nature of this event,” said Chauncy Schultz, science and operations officer at the Bismarck National Weather Service. “So, we occasionally get high wind events in North Dakota, every year, right? But to actually get them in combination with drought-type conditions and with that really low relative humidity — the relative humidity back on that October day was actually down in the 20, 25-percent range. It’s rare to get relative humidity that low with winds that high in our part of the world just by the nature of how the weather patterns usually set up that drive those high wind events.”

“So, it’s really rare to actually get all of those conditions superimposed on top of each other, which is a good thing that it doesn’t happen very often, but obviously, extremely unfortunate when it does,” said Schultz.

“Fire season can be any time in North Dakota if these conditions align,” said Schultz. “We’ve had very large fires going back a few years in January, we’ve had fires in July and August that are really large as well. We’ve certainly had past falls where we’ve had fire seasons as well, and a lot of it has to do with if we have moisture in that August, September timeframe. If we have moisture there, a lot of times the fuels, the grasses will hold a little bit of that moisture until closer to when we actually get snowfall. This particular fall, of course, we didn’t have the moisture going in, and we had a protracted warm and dry fall — more opportunities to have these wind events on top of those dry, really drought-loaded types of fuels, which can lead to these sort of extreme conditions.”

These fires likely are the worst in North Dakota’s recorded history with more than 110,000 acres being impacted. The only event that comes close happened 25 years ago.

“The closest sort of analog that we would have is actually the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, which had a lot of similarities to this one, including some really large fires in northeast Montana and western North Dakota that exceeded 20,000 acres and even greater than that,” said Schultz. “And that event also had high winds behind a cold front with relatively low relative humidity, and it also followed drought conditions — there were a lot of similarities. I think the difference maker between that event and this one that made this one even worse was that the winds were even a little bit higher. So, back in Halloween ‘99, the wind gusts were in that 60-65 mile per hour range. And with this event, the wind gusts exceeded 70 miles per hour and they stayed that high for a prolonged period of time.”

“Looking back at some of the data, we can see that the Williston area, for example, really hadn’t seen a half inch or more of precipitation in about 100 days leading up to that event,” said Schultz. “If we go back and look at the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, it was very similar. It was around 100 days preceding that event where there had not been a half inch or more of precipitation, really speaking to those drought conditions. But the numbers actually line up very similarly, and we got pretty similar results. This event back in October was the more extreme of the two, but within the general realm, we can look at those patterns and I think that will help us in the future better anticipate hopefully and predict these sorts of things. And then we hope that we can prepare for them on the ground.”

Firefighters, the North Dakota National Guard, and many others came together to battle the blazes. Along the way, remarkable footage of their efforts was captured.

“Recognizing not only the dryness that was going on, but the weather events that were coming in, and how we were, unfortunately, setting ourselves up for potential disaster, which is unfortunately, of course, what happened in this particular case,” said Schultz.

“Speaking from some experience from myself, even though I was not involved with these fires, but being a firefighter in my personal time as well, the extreme nature of this, being able to try to do anything to try to stop these fires is basically impossible,” said Schultz. “So, you’re always for the next road and you’re hoping and praying that the winds go down. And so, it’s the extreme nature of these fires that makes them a safety hazard for all the fire crews as well. And you do your best to try to stop them, but the flames are just moving so fast that you’re really, really focused on protecting structures, protecting lives as best you can until you can sort of catch the fire.”

“The topography certainly makes it a challenge for firefighting, and the firefighters, the professionals even, and all the volunteers, which we have many of across the state, deal with that problem when we get in this sort of terrain,” said Schultz. “We have that in the western part of the state where some of these fires were burning, and that really does make it difficult to get to the fire to get water on it. Ultimately, you need to get water on it or you need to build a fire break, and in a lot of these cases, they had to build fire lines or fire breaks to try to slow down the fires or stop them because of, in part, the terrain, and, of course, the wind on that October 5 day as well.”

“We were seeing 75-foot flame lengths with 60-mile-per-hour winds. Just too extreme to be close to the fire,” said Marle Baker, the fire management officer for the Three Affiliated Tribes and fire chief for Mandaree.

“That’s pretty hard to hear. You just start packing the things up. It was very emotional,” said Vawnita Best, who lives southeast of Watford City.

Remembering Johannes Nicolass Van Eden and Edgar Coppersmith who died during the fires

“My heart needed to do something more to help our community,” said Lyda Jade Spotted Bear, a Mandaree resident. “I’m proud to be from this community. And any little thing that happens, we do, we come together a lot.”

“Extremely humbling to see what this community is doing to help us,” said Baker.

“This is the best of America right here. This is where neighbors still help neighbors,” said North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.

“I know people come together for stuff like this in times of need, but it is shocking to see everybody,” said Kelci Hanson, a Tioga resident who organized a benefit auction in support of families who were most impacted by the Williams County wildfires.

“Our fellow firefighters who dropped everything that they were doing on a Saturday to come to help us save our town,” said Ray Fire Chief Kyle Weyrauch.

“We will get these kinds of conditions again someday, hopefully not anytime soon, but odds are that sometime over the next 50 years, it’s going to happen where we’ll have these sort of weather conditions again,” said Schultz. “So, an awareness of how you can take protective actions to maybe protect your property, raise awareness for those sorts of things is important going forward. We look at the meteorology of these conditions, we collaborate with fire management officials, fire officials within the state, to try and detect things like this earlier so that we can have advanced warnings — Red Flag Warnings, and things like that — that maybe can help identify these. So, we can learn from the unfortunate set of events that happened from this one to hopefully better prepare and better predict for the next one.”

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North Dakota

Today in History, 1962: Minot man charged under North Dakota law banning the sale of candy cigarettes

Published

12 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Today in History, 1962: Minot man charged under North Dakota law banning the sale of candy cigarettes

On this day in 1962, a Minot store manager was charged under North Dakota’s 1953 ban on candy cigarettes, setting up the law’s first court test over whether bubble gum cigarettes counted as illegal “confectionery.”

Here is the complete story as it appeared in the paper that day:

Minot Man Charged in Candy Cigarette Case Challenges 1953 Law

“I’d heard something about such a law but I thought they were kidding me,” the manager of the S. S. Kresge store in Minot said Friday after he was arrested and charged with displaying and possessing packaged candy cigarettes.

“I was the stock man in the Kresge store in Fargo when the law was passed in 1953, prohibiting the sale of candy cigarettes,” John H. Larson said.

“But I never paid any attention to it; I never knew it existed,” he added.

Larson, who lived in Moorhead and worked in the Fargo Kresge store from 1952 to 1959, said he had heard mention of the law but he didn’t think talk about it was serious.

See more history at Newspapers.com

Minot police Capt. Floyd Rouse had noticed a small girl in the business area of Minot with bubble gum cigarettes and a police investigation led to Larson’s arrest Friday.

It was, to any state official’s recollection, the first such charge made under the 10-year-old law, which attracted nationwide attention to North Dakota when it was passed.

Larson intends to plead innocent to the charge, because the article in question is a roll of white paper-covered bubble gum. He claims, therefore, that it is not a candy or a confectionery, which the law specifically states it is illegal to sell if designed to imitate cigarettes.

“Bubble gum is not candy or a confectionery,” Larson said.

The dictionary actually doesn’t help, because it says a confectionary is a sweetmeat, or something prepared and sold by a confectioner, or a candy.

And a confection, the dictionary says, is “a preparation of roots or fruits, etc., with sugar; a sweetmeat; preserve; confit.”

And a confit is a dry sweetmeat.

So it looks as if the law is headed for its first court test.

Larson was released on his own recognizance and is expected to appear on the charge next week.

The 1953 Legislature passed the law to do its part in keeping youngsters from smoking.

The bill stated the intent:
“…such candy or confectionery products and the purchase and use thereof by minors readily create a desire on the part of such minors to purchase and use genuine cigarettes or other tobacco products.”

The law provides a penalty on conviction of not more than a $1,000 fine, 90 days in jail, or both.

The bill was initiated in the state Senate under the sponsorship of state Sen. Agnes Geelan of Ransom, now a member of the Workmen’s Compensation Commission, and the late Sen. E. C. Stucke of McLean.

Larson said his store and all the other Kresge stores in the nation had received a carton of the imitation cigarettes through its nationwide chain store outlets. Minot police confiscated and held 19 packages of the gum.

Larson said he offered to throw out the merchandise, which was being offered as part of a store closing-out sale, but police refused to permit that.

“Those guys over there (the police) don’t know what they got into,” Larson laughingly told The Forum.

He said the gum was a popular item.

“They went like hot cakes,” he said.

The candy cigarette law wasn’t the only one of its kind the 1953 Legislature wrestled with by a long shot.

The session got more nationwide publicity than any other in many a year because of it and these other bills which were introduced, but which did not pass:

★ An anti-treat bill, designed to prevent the buying of a drink by a friend.
★ A bill which would have forbidden dancing in the dark.
★ A bill which would have made it obligatory that a beauty parlor close at 5:30 p.m. on the dot — whether or not a customer’s hair was ready. The reason for that bill apparently stemmed from an angry legislator whose dinner had been kept waiting because his wife was in a beauty parlor.

The Senate passed the candy cigarette law 41 to 7.

Among the few not voting for it was former Sen. Kenneth Pyle of Cass, who explained his vote by reading a telegram he said he had received that day and which was signed by all his grandchildren. It read:

“Dear Grandpa. Please don’t let them take our candy from us.”

The bill passed the House by a vote of 68 to 39 after long debate, some serious and some tongue-in-cheek.

Former Rep. A. C. Langseth of Eddy-Foster, among many others, spoke for the bill. He said:

“If the health and morals of our young people are not worth legislating for, I don’t know what is.”

Former Rep. Guy Larson of Burleigh observed:

“There is one ingredient lacking in the bill — common sense.”

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North Dakota

Nebraska Hoops Game Day: North Dakota

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

Coming off of one of its best weeks in program history, Nebraska looks to keep its record-setting start rolling tonight against North Dakota.

Here is what you need to know going into the game as the Huskers try to improve to a perfect 12-0…

Who, What, Where, When

Nebraska Cornhuskers (11-0, 2-0 Big Ten) vs. North Dakota Fighting Hawks (5-9, 0-0 Summit League)

Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025 – 7:00 p.m. CT

Pinnacle Bank Arena (15,500)

TV: Big Ten Network

Radio: Huskers Radio Network

Internet/Streaming: Big Ten Plus

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Nebraska projected starters

Jamarques Lawrence	G	Sr.	6-3/185	Lawrence scored 14 points with six assists in the win over Illinois, including a buzzer-beater 3-pointer. His game-winning three was NU’s first since Jan. 15, 2018 (James Palmer Jr. vs. Illinois).
Sam Hoiberg	G	Sr.	6-0/180	After his seven points, six assists, and five rebounds at Illinois, Hoiberg now leads the nation with a 5.5-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio. He’s also fourth in the Big Ten with 1.7 spg.
Pryce Sandfort	G	Jr.	6-7/210	Sandfort scored 26 of Nebraska’s first 37 points en route to a career-high 32 in the upset at Illinois. He’s now 11th in the Big Ten in scoring (17.1 ppg) and 12th in 3-point percentage (39.3%).
Berke Buyuktuncel	F	Jr.	6-10/240	Foul trouble and an elbow to the face limited Buyuktuncel at Illinois, but he still finished with three points, three rebounds, three steals, and three blocks in the win.
Rienk Mast	F	Sr.	6-10/250	Mast scored 12 of his 17 points in the second half at Illinois, along with his team-high seven rebounds. He’s now 10th in the Big Ten at 17.9 ppg while shooting 54.6% overall and 41.7% from three.

North Dakota projected starters

Eli King	G	Sr.	6-3/193	A former transfer from Iowa State, King is UND’s lone returning starter from last season. He averages 11.1 points and a team-high 2.7 steals per game.
Greyson Uelmen	G	RFr.	6-2/185	After redshirting last season, Uelmen leads the Fighting Hawks at 13.1 points per game while shooting 50% from the field. He also dishes out 2.2 apg.
Zach Kraft	G	So.	6-3/185	Kraft averages 8.0 points per game and leads North Dakota with 32 made 3-pointers at a 39.0% clip this season.
Garrett Anderson	G	Sr.	6-6/195	A transfer from Central Washington, Anderson averages 9.3 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.4 assists, and 1.4 steals per game. He’s also second on the team with 20 made 3-pointers.
George Natsvlishvili	F	Jr.	6-10/239	A native of the nation of Georgia, Natsvlishvili joined North Dakota last season. The junior currently averages 8.6 points on 57.3% shooting with 4.9 rebounds per game.

3 keys to victory

Don’t get ‘fat and happy’

To borrow a quote from former Husker guard Emmanuel Bandoumel a few years ago, Nebraska cannot get “fat and happy” after its 11-0 start to the season. As impressive as NU has been thus far, it must stay dialed in amid finals week and the looming holiday break. The good news is that Nebraska was in nearly this exact situation two seasons ago when North Dakota came to Lincoln and led by as many as 14 points in the second half. The Huskers rallied back for an 83-75 victory, but that game was a major wake-up call during their NCAA Tournament run. NU must lock in from the opening tip until the final buzzer to do what it’s supposed to do and remain perfect.

Protect the basketball

If there’s one way North Dakota can make things interesting tonight, it will be by flustering Nebraska’s ball handlers with heavy pressure and forcing turnovers. The Fighting Hawks rank 25th nationally in defensive turnover percentage (21.3%) and 45th in defensive steal percentage (12.2%). The Huskers have been good about taking care of the basketball this season, ranking 21st in offensive TO% (13.9) and 27th in offensive steal percentage (7.3). UND runs many of the same defensive schemes as Nebraska, so NU should be no strangers to what it sees tonight. However, the Huskers must handle the pressure to keep the game under control.

Win the glass

While Nebraska shocked the college basketball world with its 83-80 win at Illinois, the Huskers made life unnecessarily difficult on themselves in the victory. That’s because the Fighting Illini managed to score 19 second-chance points off 13 offensive rebounds. That included seven offensive boards for 14 points during UI’s 14-point comeback in the first half. North Dakota is hardly the rebounding team Illinois is, ranking 314th nationally in offensive rebounding percentage (25.6%). Still, Nebraska can’t let UND or any opponent get so many extra shots.

Quotable

“The getaway game is always a dangerous one. I dealt with it in the NBA with the All-Star break. You look forward to having a few days off and an opportunity to spend time with family, but you have to stay focused and go out and take care of business.”
-Head coach Fred Hoiberg on Nebraska needing to lock in for its finals week showdown against North Dakota.

Prediction

Nebraska (-29.5) 91, North Dakota 65

Robin’s season record: 10-1

Vs. the spread: 9-2

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North Dakota

Recap: Penn State wrestling sets NCAA history with 77th consecutive dual meet win

Published

2 days ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

Recap: Penn State wrestling sets NCAA history with 77th consecutive dual meet win

Penn State goes two for two and sets a new NCAA record

12/20/2025 07:26:07 PM

Penn State won two matches at the Collegiate Wrestling Duals and has set a new NCAA Division I record with 77 consecutive dual meet victories. The Lions pass Oklahoma State’s previous mark of 76 by beating Stanford 42-0. Earlier in the day, Penn State shut out North Dakota State.

Here are the full results from both matches:

PSU vs. NDSU

125 pounds: No. 2 Luke Lilledahl, Penn State d. No. 31 Ezekiel Witt, NDSU, 6-5 (PSU 3-0)
133 pounds: No. 10 Marcus Blaze, PSU md. No. 29 Tristan Daugherty, NDSU, 11-3 (PSU 7-0)
141 pounds: Nate Desmond, Penn State d. Michael Olson, NDSU, 4-1 (PSU 10-0)
149 pounds: No. 1 Shayne Van Ness, PSU TF No. 24 Max Petersen, NDSU, 19-2 (5:16) (PSU 15-0)
157 pounds: No. 8 PJ Duke, Penn State md. No. 21 Gavin Drexler, NDSU, 16-5 (PSU 19-0)
165 pounds: No. 1 Mitchell Mesenbrink, PSU TF Boeden Greenley, NDSU 18-1 (3:45) (PSU 24-0)
174 pounds: No. 1 Levi Haines, Penn State F. Max Magayna, NDSU (1:38) (PSU 30-0)
184 pounds: No. 4 Rocco Welsh, PSU TF Andrew McMcgonagle, NDSU, 19-4 (6:17) (PSU 35-0)
197 pounds: Josh Barr, Penn State TF Devin Wasley, NDSU, 19-3 (3:20) (PSU 40-0)
285 pounds: No. 13 Cole Mirasola, PSU F Drew Blackburn, NDSU (:33) (PSU 46-0)

PSU vs. Stanford
125 pounds: No. 2 Luke Lilledahl, Penn State d. No. 12 Nicco Provo, Stanford, 4-2 (PSU 3-0)
133 pounds: No. 10 Marcus Blaze, PSU F No. 6 Tyler Knox, Stanford (6:44) (PSU 9-0)
141 pounds: #Nate Desmond Penn State md. Lain Yapoujian, Stanford, 9-0 (PSU 13-0)
149 pounds: No. 1 Shayne Van Ness, PSU d. 14 Aden Valencia, Stanford, 10- 4 (PSU 16-0)
157 pounds: No. 8 PJ Duke, Penn State d. No. 5 Daniel Cardenas, Stanford, 5-2 (PSU 19-0)
165 pounds: No. 1 Mitchell Mesenbrink, PSU F. EJ Parco, Stanford (4:23) (PSU 25-0)
174 pounds: No. 1 Levi Haines, PSU md. Lorenzo Norman, Stanford, 14-4 (PSU 29-0)
184 pounds: No. 4 Rocco Welsh, PSU d. Abraham Wojcikiewicz, Stanford, 5-1 (PSU 32-0)
197 pounds: Josh Barr, PSU TF No. 19 Angelo Posada, Stanford, 19-3 (PSU 37-0)
285 pounds: No. 13 Cole Mirasola PSU TF Luke Duthie, Stanford, 21-6 (2:59) (PSU 42-0)

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