Montana
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.”
WASHINGTON ― Montana Republican Senate nominee Kurt Alme, who previously served as his state’s U.S. attorney, cut a plea deal in 2020 that allowed a tribal police officer who sexually abused a 6-year-old girl to serve less than a year in prison and avoid being registered as a sex offender.
Alme, who has President Donald Trump’s backing in his bid for Senate, served as Montana’s U.S. attorney in two stints. Trump appointed him both times; Alme served in the role from September 2017 through December 2020, and then again from March 2025 through March 2026.
Alme oversaw the case of Mychal Thomas Damon, who was indicted in June 2019 by a grand jury on one count of abusive sexual contact with an individual under 12, which carries a maximum punishment of a lifetime in prison, a $250,000 fine and no less than five years to a lifetime of supervised release. The average sentence for this crime is less severe, but still significant: 62 months in prison, no fine and 143 months of supervised release, based on an analysis of 2025 data provided by the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Damon, 28, had admitted he touched the 6-year-old’s genitals. But in February 2020, Alme’s office filed a plea deal in his case that reduced his charge to felony child abuse.
The changes in the plea deal raised the alleged age of the victim from below 12 to below 14, stripped out the language of sexual intent and moved the offense out of the federal sex crime framework, meaning Damon would no longer be required to register as a sex offender. It jointly recommended Damon be sentenced to the time he’d already served of 324 days, and required only a sex offender evaluation. Alme’s name appears on the bottom of the document, along with a signature by his assistant U.S. attorney, Cassady Adams.
In June, Alme filed a sentencing memorandum that described Damon’s conduct, which included details of him touching the child’s vagina with skin-to-skin contact, and the adverse effect it had on her mental health. Local reporting at the time said the victim had told a therapist “Mychal touched me” and hurt her by putting his fingers in her “hoo hoo.”
Ten days later, Alme announced Damon was being sentenced to time served of 324 days and two years of supervised release. As of June 2026, Damon is not listed in the national sex offender registry or in Montana’s Sexual or Violent Offender Registry.
It’s not clear why Alme reduced the charges against Damon as significantly as he did. During part of his tenure as U.S. attorney, his office declined 64% of sexual assault cases. He conceded in a 2019 interview that this “is something that has to be worked on,” and noted that a lot of these cases are declined due to “weak or insufficient evidence.”
Asked what happened in Damon’s case, an Alme campaign spokesman on Thursday lashed out at unnamed Democrats for trying to make him look bad.
“Kurt’s liberal opponents are twisting the facts to manufacture a fake narrative that exploits crimes against women and children,” said Alme’s spokesperson. “Department of Justice policy required defendants to plead to the most serious charge readily provable from the evidence. Kurt strongly supported the Multi-Disciplinary Teams on our Native American reservations, led by his office, to support investigations of crimes against children and to support victims.”
His spokesperson also pushed back on the idea that Alme unreasonably declined a large number of sexual assault cases during his tenure as U.S. attorney.
“Kurt’s office prosecuted every viable sexual abuse felony referred to it and pursued the most serious charge readily provable from the evidence,” the spokesperson said. “Many ‘declined’ cases were to allow more appropriate tribal prosecutions ― they were not dropped. Kurt will bring his years of experience prosecuting criminals and working with the Sexual Assault Response Teams on our Native American reservations to the U.S. Senate to strengthen investigations, support victims, and better protect women and children.”
The campaign pointed HuffPost to a 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office that found the most common reason for U.S. attorney’s offices to decline sexual abuse cases referred in from Indian country was “weak or insufficient admissible evidence.” It also highlighted statements of support for Alme in an October 2025 press release by Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), when he celebrated Alme being confirmed as U.S. attorney.
Alme is currently running for Daines’ Senate seat, and Daines went out of his way to clear the path for him. In a stunning and orchestrated maneuver, the two-term senator in March abruptly withdrew from reelection as Alme filed to run for his seat, minutes before the state’s filing period closed. Daines’ last-minute change-up was an effort to block potential Democrats or any major Republican challenger from jumping into an open Senate race.
Alme is taking on Democrat Alani Bankhead and independent candidate Seth Bodnar in the November election. Bankhead and Bodner have been duking it out for weeks, with each appealing to different factions of the Democratic party and calling on the other to drop out.
Bankhead, a retired Air Force officer, unexpectedly won the Democratic primary earlier this month, boosted by grassroots supporters and more than $2.5 million in outside money from a progressive veterans’ PAC. But Bodnar, a former University of Montana president who did not appear on the primary ballot, has bipartisan endorsements from prominent establishment figures, including former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester and former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot. He’s also significantly outraised Bankhead and Alme.
This Senate seat is rated “solid Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook’s Political Report, meaning Alme is well-positioned to win the general election. But this race would be more competitive if Bodner and Alme were going head to head, without Bankhead in the running.
Where Khloe Kardashian Stands With Ex French Montana More Than 10 Years After Breakup
French Montana is done keeping up with reality TV.
In fact, he only agreed to appear on Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Kourtney & Khloé Take the Hamptons over a decade ago as a favor to then-girlfriend Khloe Kardashian.
“She said to get on the show,” he exclusively told E! News at the BET Awards on June 28. “And I got on the show. Shout out to Khloe.”
The “Ever Since U Left Me” rapper, who split with Kardashian in December 2014 after eight months of dating, said the experience was “fun” because her family kept it real.
“They filmed their real life,” he continued. “And we were part of something together that one time. So it felt great. It didn’t feel like work because they film what they do everyday.”
As for his future in reality TV, the 41-year-old said those days are over, shutting down any prospective offers with a simple, “Negative.”
Although the “Unforgettable” artist—whose real name is Karim Kharbouch—may not be returning to television anytime soon, he has no problem hanging out with his ex-girlfriend these days.
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