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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.”