Montana

Montana’s prolonged fire season slugs along toward conclusion

Published

2 months ago

October 30, 2024

Montana’s prolonged fire season slugs along toward conclusion

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 most part,” Zumpfe said.

Along the Hi-Line, the weather service reported cold temperatures and even snow. Small amounts of precipitation in southwestern Montana, in addition to an oncoming cold front, dampened the state’s largest fires in Ravalli County. Meteorologists reported that central Idaho’s large fires received even more rain, supplying new optimism for Montana’s air quality.

190,000-acre burn challenges eastern Montana ranchers

Outside Jim Gilliland’s window, just 200 yards from his house near Otter, blackened ground marked the Remington Fire’s farthest advance. Eighty of Gilliland’s hay bales burned in the fire, leaving him with only 20. The blaze consumed a water tank, its lining made of six-inch-thick rubber. “I feel worse about the cows,” Gilliland said.

“The nature of this cool-season weather system contributes to better air quality,” Zumpfe said.

Wildfires spread faster during the day, so fewer hours of daylight reduce their growth rates. Decreasing temperatures throughout the early winter also combat rapid fire growth. But without enough precipitation to qualify as a “season-ending event,” wildfire danger persists across eastern Montana and low elevations of western Montana. According to Shawn Palmquist, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Billings, some parts of the state aren’t expecting extensive precipitation for the next eight to 14 days.

“Areas south and east of Yellowstone County are anywhere from moderate to extreme droughts,” Palmquist said, noting that snow is forecast at some higher elevations.

A low-pressure system, a large area of low atmospheric pressure often accompanied by humidity and precipitation, over Idaho split in two, with one portion moving over Canada and the other through Wyoming. After moving inland from the Pacific Ocean, low-pressure systems often divide during their eastward journey from Idaho, leaving much of Montana without precipitation for extended periods.

The southern perimeter of the Horse Gulch Fire remains charred 10 weeks after the 15,000-acre burn.
Credit: Zeke Lloyd / MTFP

This phenomenon had major impacts over the course of the 2024 fire season, according to the National Weather Service.

“Eastern Montana, especially far southeastern Montana, has had some of the driest areas that we forecasted over the last summer and into the fall,” Palmquist said.

According to Cory Calnan, who serves as the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation deputy chief for the Fire Protection Bureau, southeastern Montana’s fire season has been marked by frequent and fast-paced burns.

“We routinely have fire activity in that area, but just sheer volume, particularly in the Tongue River Basin, of acres burned and the impacts to the agriculture communities there are pretty notable,” Calnan said.

The Remington Fire, a late-August fire that blew northward from northeastern Wyoming, stands out as one of the largest Montana fires of the last decade. The Remington’s burn scar covers ranchland across three Montana counties, altogether accounting for roughly half of the 443,000 Montana acres burned by wildfire this season.

Prolonged fire season complicates prescribed burns

Montana’s western forests, as well as its eastern plains, have been shaped by fire, purposeful and otherwise, over the course of millenia. Prescribed burns represent the human application of fire on terrain, using intentional combustion to clear excess ground fuel within a well-monitored perimeter. Rarely, controlled burns grow wild.

Without the Remington Fire, the number of acres burned this season would be relatively standard in comparison to the seasons of the past decade. But with almost 200,000 acres burned by the Remington Fire alone, the 2024 fire season instead ranks behind only two from the last 10 years: 2021 and 2017.

The 2024 fire season also saw fires more frequently in proximity to large urban areas than in previous seasons. The Horse Gulch Fire burned 20 miles north of Helena, the Miller Peak Fire burned eight miles southeast of Missoula and the Sharrott Creek Fire burned five miles west of Hamilton. Calnan highlighted the agency’s central mission to defend people and their residences from fire through a strict suppression policy.

“For us in the state of Montana, and the values that we protect, rapid, safe, aggressive, initial attack is the best tool we have,” said Calnan, who also highlighted the more widespread use of infrared-equipped aircraft to firefighting crews.

The southern edge of the Barber Draw Fire, a 6,000-acre fire, stretches to the Tongue River Reservoir.
Credit: Zeke Lloyd / MTFP

“We call these Incident Awareness and Assessment Aircraft,” Calnan said. “We have a relatively high certainty where lightning strikes are occurring. We were able to fly that aircraft the morning after lightning and detect fires that had not yet been detected.”

For land-managing agencies, the upcoming off-months offer opportunities to find other new technologies for the next season and review their firefighting strategies. And even without a substantial amount of the state burning, the fire season’s impact will stretch well into the winter.

Agencies are still finalizing their cost analyses of fire season, agreements that allocate large sums of money and sometimes spur contentious correspondence. On Oct. 9, Gov. Greg Gianforte shared a letter rebuking the Forest Service over a potential cost-sharing breakdown for the Horse Gulch Fire, a late-July blaze that cost more than $14 million to fight.

How fire remakes Montana’s landscapes

Within their brief lifespans, wildfires bring dramatic changes to Montana’s forests and grasslands. But many of the most lasting effects on the landscape appear in the weeks, months and years after the flames are snuffed out.

Montana reinvested in firefighting resources during the 2023 legislative session. In a July interview with Montana Free Press, Gianforte highlighted legislation that introduced more than $100 million for firefighting-related expenditures, including “fire suppression costs,” “fuel reduction and mitigation” and “forest restoration.” Firefighters at the state level say they see its impact on the ground.

“In Montana, we’re very fortunate for House Bill 883 and the ability to invest in state-controlled resources and assets to help us respond to fires,” Calnan said.

Though this season’s fires did not stretch the state’s resources, out-of-state blazes kept much of Montana’s sky hazy throughout the summer. Wildfire smoke poured in from Canada throughout July. Wyoming, Washington and Idaho fires exported unhealthy air over Montana later in the fire season.

As winter weather clears away smoke across the region, prescribed fires are again on the docket for land-managing agencies across the state. Pile burning, a type of prescribed burn featuring forest debris that’s been organized into well-separated clumps, will begin when snow falls at lower elevations around the state.

“Pile burning activities, those are done when there’s adequate snow on the ground — that’s a low resource requirement and low resource input impact there,” Calnan said. “So we’ll see those start as we see the conditions moderate even further.”

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Montana

How Do Montana State, North Dakota State Compare To Past FCS National Championship Contenders?

Published

7 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

How Do Montana State, North Dakota State Compare To Past FCS National Championship Contenders?

As we prepare for the 2025 FCS National Championship game, we wanted to take a look at how Montana State and North Dakota State compare to previous teams who have made appearances in the FCS national title game over the past five seasons.

Do these teams belong in the same conversation as last season’s South Dakota State team or the 16-0 North Dakota State team in 2019? We examine both teams in this season’s national title game and compare them to those who have appeared in the national title game in the last five full seasons. Due to the unique format of the season, we excluded the shortened spring 2021 season.

We utilized several advanced metrics, including the Massey Power Rating, Sagarin Power Rating, and College Football Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS). The SRS is not logged for FCS teams, but we have utilized their formula to make our own SRS for teams at the FCS level. The calculation is straightforward, using the average margin of victory and strength of schedule.

	Massey Power Rating Advertisement	Sagarin Rating	SRS
2024 Montana State	53.5	76.6 Advertisement	26.2
2024 North Dakota State	55.8	76.3	25.7 Advertisement
2023 South Dakota State	62.8	83.3	24.3
2023 Montana Advertisement	49.9	69.1	15.9
2022 South Dakota State	58.8 Advertisement	76.0	25.9
2022 North Dakota State	55.3	69.7 Advertisement	18.9
2021 North Dakota State	63.3	76.3	23.3 Advertisement
2021 Montana State	52.3	65.1	18.4
2019 North Dakota State Advertisement	61.4	78.6	24.4
2019 James Madison	57.2 Advertisement	72.8	22.3

Both teams this season compare favorably with the past four FCS national champions. Montana State has the second-highest adjusted margin of victory, winning by an average of 19.1 points per game. It only trails the 2019 North Dakota State team, which defeated opponents by an average of 19.3 points per game.

The most interesting takeaway is that this is the first matchup in the FCS National Championship in the past five full seasons in which both teams appear to be playing at a championship standard. Analytically, this is the closest gap between the teams playing in the national championship in the past five seasons.

This should be no surprise to fans, who have seen dominant performances over the past few seasons in Frisco. The average margin of victory in the past five national championships has been 16.4 points, with the closest game being Sam Houston State’s two-point win over South Dakota State in the spring of 2021.

If you were to average these three metrics together, they would rank as follows:

1. 2023 South Dakota State (56.8)
2. 2019 North Dakota State (54.8)
3. 2021 North Dakota State (54.3)
4. 2022 South Dakota State (53.6)
5. 2024 North Dakota State (52.6)
6. 2024 Montana State (52.1)
7. 2019 James Madison (50.8)
8. 2022 North Dakota State (47.9)
9. 2021 Montana State (45.3)
10. 2023 Montana (44.9)

Every metric we analyzed indicates that Monday’s game could be an instant classic. Both teams rank much closer to recent FCS national champions, compared to the runner-ups over the past five seasons.

No. 1 Montana State will face No. 2 North Dakota State in the 2025 FCS National Championship game in Frisco, Texas. Kickoff is scheduled for Jan. 6 at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN.

Behind The Numbers: FCS National Championship Preview
FCS National Championship: Offensive Spotlight
FCS National Championship: Defensive Spotlight
History Of The FCS National Championship Game
2024 FCS Playoffs: Official Bracket, Schedule, Scores

Follow FCS Football Central on social media for ongoing coverage of FCS football, including on X, Facebook, and YouTube.

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Montana

Montana hits Yellowstone with lawsuit over bison plan

Published

17 hours ago

January 3, 2025

Press Room

Montana hits Yellowstone with lawsuit over bison plan

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte and two agencies have raised a lawsuit to challenge the Yellowstone National Park’s way of managing its bison herd, arguing that it violates federal laws.

Newsweek has contacted the Yellowstone National Park’s press office for comment via email outside normal business hours.

Why It Matters

The clash between Montana and the National Park Service, among other officials and entities that maintain the sprawling park, stems from state authorities’ belief that the park’s plan to manage its bison herd doesn’t do enough to reduce the risk of brucellosis transmission.

Though a bacterial disease that mainly infects cattle, swine, goats, sheep and dogs, brucellosis can be transferred to humans if a human has direct contact with an infected animal, or if they eat or drink contaminated animal products.

A bison and calf near the Yellowstone River in Wyoming’s Hayden Valley on June 22, 2022. Montana’s government has raised a lawsuit challenging Yellowstone National Park’s bison management plan, arguing it violates federal laws.

Matthew Brown/AP

What To Know

On December 31, Gianforte’s office, Montana’s Department of Livestock and its Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks filed a lawsuit over Yellowstone National Park’s bison management plan.

In a news release about the lawsuit, the state government said its concerns had been ongoing since 2022, when the national park first announced its intent to draft the plan.

In 2023, Gianforte criticized the park’s bison management, citing Yellowstone National Park’s “failure to meet its own mandates,” a lack of cooperation of the park with the state of Montana, and deficient and misstated analysis.

According to the lawsuit, the size of Yellowstone National Park’s bison herd has been a “source of constant strife” in the state, as the boom in the bison population has increased the spread of brucellosis.

Yellowstone National Park and Montana adopted bison management plans in 2000 to tackle the issue, the lawsuit added, with a goal of keeping the bison herd to 3,000 while combating the spread of the disease.

“Over the last 20 years, YNP has utterly failed to manage to the specified population target or implement critical elements of its plan,” the lawsuit said.

It added that the new plan developed by the park in 2024 “fails to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and is a violation of the National Park Service Organic Act (NPSOA) and Yellowstone National Park Protection Act (YNPPA).”

The new plan was also “developed without meaningful consultation and collaboration with one of its “cooperating agencies”…the State of Montana,” the lawsuit said.

What Is Yellowstone National Park’s Bison Management Plan

When Yellowstone National Park announced its new bison management plan last year, it said the Record of Decision, a culmination of the Environmental Impact Statement and National Environmental Policy Act process, allowed the National Park Service to manage the bison based on new scientific information that suggested the 2000 plan needed updating.

The new information related to how brucellosis could be regulated, the park announced in July. It added that the decision “continues the original purpose of the [Interagency Bison Management Plan from 2000] to maintain a wild, free ranging bison population and reduce the risk of brucellosis transmission from bison to cattle.”

The 2024 plan said the bison herd population would be managed in a range between 3,500 and 6,000, up from the goal of 3,000 in the 2000 plan.

The new plan also called for expanded bison hunting and greater bison freedom, allowing them to roam beyond the tolerance zones along the park’s northern and western edges, Montana Free Press reported.

According to the outlet, Tom McDonald, the vice chairman of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, supported this element of the new plan.

McDonald told Montana Free Press that expanding where Yellowstone bison could go would help make tribal and state hunting safer, which is a method used to regulate the bison population.

What People Are Saying

Mike Honeycutt, the director of Montana’s Department of Livestock, said in a December 31 news release: “The Department of Livestock is committed to preventing, controlling and eradicating animal disease. Given the way NPS has ignored feedback from Montana, we have major concerns about potential threats to animal health from the possible spread of brucellosis.”

Christy Clark, the director of Montana’s Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said in the release: “Bison represent a complex and contentious issue with both livestock producers and wildlife advocates. We had hoped for and asked for a better and more transparent process in developing this EIS. Those requests were ignored.”

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte said in the release: “The National Park Service has repeatedly and consistently failed to engage with the State in a meaningful and transparent manner as required by law throughout the planning process. NPS has not given us a fair shake and has ignored concerns raised by the State. We will always defend our state from federal overreach.”

Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly said in July of the park’s 2024 bison management plan: “We have come a very long way since the last bison management plan was signed in 2000. This new plan solidifies much of the progress made over the past two decades and provides a foundation for future decision making. We appreciate the significant engagement on this plan by our affiliated Tribes, partners, and the general public.”

What Happens Next

The lawsuit requests that the Montana district court rule on whether Yellowstone National Park has violated federal law with its 2024 plan.

Do you have a story Newsweek should be covering? Do you have any questions about this story? Contact LiveNews@newsweek.com.

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Montana

Significant snowstorm will affect Montana on Friday and Saturday

Published

1 day ago

January 2, 2025

Press Room

Significant snowstorm will affect Montana on Friday and Saturday

Significant snowstorm to impact Montana Friday and Saturday

WINTER WEATHER ALERTS are in effect for most of Montana for the next couple of days.

A WINTER STORM WARNING is in effect most of north-central Montana from 5am/11am/5pm Friday until 5am/5pm Saturday.

A WINTER STORM WARNING is in effect for central and southern Phillips County, Garfield County, and Petroleum County from 11am Friday until 5pm Saturday.

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY is in effect for the southern Rocky Mountain Front, the high plains, the Bozeman and Helena areas, and the mountains in central Montana from 8pm Thursday/11am Friday until 5am/5pm Saturday.

There is going to be scattered snow around tonight, generally in central Montana, including around Great Falls, Helena, and Lewistown, and light snow accumulations of up to an inch or two are possible. We are also going to have overcast skies tonight with a few areas of fog around. It is also going to be cold tonight in north-central Montana as lows are going to be in the -0s and 0s. Around Helena, lows tonight are going to be in the mid to upper teens and low to mid 20s.

A significant snowstorm is going to impact our area on Friday and Saturday. As we go through Friday, snow will develop from northwest to southeast. Around Helena, snow is likely tomorrow morning, but the snow will taper off from southwest to northeast tomorrow afternoon/evening. In north-central Montana, locations around and west of I-15 and in southern portions of north-central Montana, including around Great Falls and Lewistown, will see snow begin to develop during the morning. This snow will then overspread the rest of north-central Montana during the afternoon and evening, and will arrive in northeastern Montana during the late evening.

Widespread snow is then likely tomorrow night in north-central Montana, with areas of snow around the Helena area tomorrow night. Some of the snow that falls tomorrow and tomorrow night will be heavy at times. Light to moderate snow will then continue to fall on Saturday, especially in locations east of I-15, but this snow will gradually taper off from west to east as the day goes on.

Check the Montana Department of Transportation website before you hit the road to find out which roads are snow-covered, which ones have ice and/or slush, and if any roads are closed. You can also check MDT cameras from across the state by clicking here.

This snowstorm will drop a significant amount of snow. A widespread 3-12” of snow is expected in central and north-central Montana from this evening through Saturday evening, with most locations receiving 5-10” of snow. In the mountains, 6-18” of snow is expected through Saturday evening. Due to this snow, difficult travel conditions are expected tomorrow and Saturday (especially tomorrow afternoon through Saturday morning), so please use extreme caution when driving and consider delaying your travel if possible. Also, give yourself plenty of extra time to get to where you need to go.

It is also going to continue to be cold tomorrow and Saturday in north-central Montana as highs are going to be in the single digits, teens, and low 20s, with lows in the -0s, 0s, and low 10s. Around Helena, highs tomorrow are going to be in the upper teens and low to mid 20s in most locations and highs on Saturday are going to be in the upper 20s and low to mid 30s in most locations. It is also going to be breezy in some areas east of I-15 on Friday as sustained wind speeds are going to be between 10 and 20 mph. There is also going to be a breeze around on Saturday along the Divide and the Rocky Mountain Front as well as in northeastern Montana as sustained wind speeds are going to be between 10 and 20 mph.

On Sunday, we are going to have mostly cloudy skies with a few snow showers around in north-central Montana and scattered snow around Helena. Snow is then likely around Helena on Monday and there is going to be some scattered snow around on Monday in north-central Montana, generally around and west of I-15 as well as along the MT 200 corridor. We are also going to have a wide range of temperatures on these two days as highs are going to range from the single digits to the mid 30s, with the coldest temperatures along the Hi-Line east of I-15 and the warmest temperatures around Helena.

We are then going to have partly to mostly sunny skies on Tuesday with a few snow showers around during the morning as a disturbance leaves our area. We are also going to have a wide range of temperatures again on Tuesday as highs are going to range from the mid teens to the mid 30s, with the coldest temperatures in northeastern Montana. It is also going to be a little breezy in some areas on Tuesday as sustained wind speeds are going to be between 5 and 20 mph.

Some isolated rain and snow showers are then possible on Wednesday as another weak disturbance passes through our area. We are also going to have partly to mostly cloudy skies on Wednesday. Partly cloudy skies and mainly dry conditions are then expected on Thursday as high pressure is going to be in control of our weather. Warmer air is also going to return to our area for these two days as highs are going to be in the 30s and low 40s. There is also going to be a breeze around on Wednesday as sustained wind speeds are going to be between 10 and 20 mph.