Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A hellacious place to fight wild fires

Our local paper is running a series on wild fires and changes needed to prevent more deaths. This one is about the Salmon River breaks (part of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness). You guys who've fought fires might see some of the problems they face in there.


Tough Breaks: Idaho Home to One of West�s Most Dangerous Wildfire Sites


ASHLEY SMITH � TIMES-NEWS
5 Changes Needed to Prevent More Wildfire Deaths: Never Again Series

RIGGINS � One of the most complicated, arduous and dangerous wildfire sites in the West is along Idaho�s Salmon River Breaks, home to hellacious winds, too many lightning-ignited spot fires to count and some of the most extreme fire behavior and fire runs veterans have seen.

Two helitac crew members were killed there in the Cramer Fire of 2003, and a crew boss deployed his shelter but died on the Ship Island Fire in 1979. In addition, the Salmon-Challis National Forest has had 208 firefighter entrapments over the past 33 years.

The fierce terrain on the Salmon Breaks is far worse than the deadly canyons on Yarnell Hill in Arizona, where 19 hotshots were killed this summer, and on Storm King Mountain in Colorado, where 14 hotshots and other firefighters were killed July 6, 1994.

Firefighting on the Breaks is vertical, as mountains and cliffs tightly flanking the river soar to 9,000 feet, forming a narrow chasm.

The combination of cleft, mountains and river creates its own dangerous weather patterns.

As storm cells hit the mountain ranges and river canyons, they stall and squat over the Breaks, strafing the arid territory with so much lightning that a map of resulting spot fires resembles a swath of Dotted Swiss.

Thermals create daily slope and canyon winds, and nocturnal inversions mean cooler canyon winds replace warmer air atop the river, creating �thermal belts� that let the middle third of the slopes burn all night, spreading uphill and down-valley while rolling out embers.

�The winds funnel through,� said Randy Skelton, deputy fire staff officer for Idaho�s Payette National Forest. �You try to insert (firefighters) sideways on the ridges. The fire will come off the top and go down, then jump the river. Another problem is that in summer, the water gets lower and lower, and jet boat access isn�t as good.
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A view of the Salmon River Breaks on Nov. 7, 2013

�If a fire is down there, the whole river canyon fills with smoke and you can�t see anything,�

One of the worst tragedies on the Breaks was the 2003 Cramer Fire, which killed two helitack crew members on a mountaintop. They kept calling on their radios for a helicopter that repeatedly was promised but didn�t come until after the fire had burned over them.

A chilling film on that fire was completed last March by Eric Hipke, a South Canyon survivor who produces videos for the Wildland Fire Safety Training Annual Refresher (WFSTAR).

He worked 16 hours a day, donating 100 hours to complete it for springtime training before the fire season got underway.

�We had a room full of tough smokejumpers (watch the film), and you could have heard a pin drop,� said Joe Brinkley, whose triplet brother Levi died on the South Canyon Fire.

In August 2012, the lightning-sparked Mustang Complex fire scorched 340,659 acres near Salmon, mostly in the Breaks� steep, inaccessible terrain, forcing the evacuation of 400 homes.
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ASHLEY SMITH � TIMES-NEWS Randy Skelton, Deputy Fire Staff Officer with U.S. Forest Service on the Payette National Forest, talks about fighting fire along the Salmon River Breaks.

That blaze �went 5 miles downriver against the wind,� Skelton recalled. �Fire goes northeast here � until it hits the Breaks.�

A year earlier, on Aug. 25, 2011, the Salt Fire moved about 1� miles up Goodluck Creek within 75 minutes, blasting through mountain beetle-killed trees and blocking the escape route to a safety zone. A bulldozer operator, driver and safety officer narrowly escaped with their lives. (WFSTAR video at bit.ly/HTAW8M).

And in 1985, 72 firefighters deployed their shelters when wind chased the Butte Fire up a slope in mid-afternoon. About 1,000 firefighters were called to that 31,150-acre, lightning-sparked fire.

On the Breaks, rappellers and smokejumpers attack from the top, and other crews rely on jetboats, horses and pack strings to augment supplies and manpower.

Skelton calls the peaks �deceiving tops.�

�You think it�s the top. It�s not. Climbing up the cliff, the route ends; you go down and try again. That�s where some technology would help.�

His motto when fighting fires here? �Don�t go to the next ridge. Go to the best ridge.�

�It�s very, very steep, and it�s relatively inaccessible,� recalls Larry Edwards, a retired hotshots superintendent who fought fire in the Gospel Hump Wilderness Area and other areas in the Breaks. �Logistics-wise, it involves a lot of walking and hiking. You get flown in, or you might go in on a jet boat even. You�re usually in the bottom at the river or on top of the ridge. There�s no in-between.

�You get �spiked out.� You�re not really in a camp; you�re just in a wide spot near the (fire) line you�re working on. After five or six days, it starts to wear on people,� Edwards said. �The Breaks are definitely tough.�

The Breaks provide few roads or flat spots on which to create a heliport or fire camp. What the area does have is foliage of too many heights. With seedlings and trees that are small, medium and big, fire can climb that ladder, setting the stage for a crown fire, in which flames race from treetop to treetop.

�Once you get a (fire) column standing up 40 feet, it gets so heavy, it�s going to come down,� Skelton said. �Gasses and carbon and moisture and steam, embers and ash, are all boiling and boiling.

�It starts getting heavier and heavier and starts cauliflowering out. Eventually, it�s going to fall down. It�s fascinating to watch.�

Skelton has good reason to be proud of the results on the 195-acre Howard Ranch Fire that sparked this Aug. 17 in the Payette National Forest.

With about eight smokejumpers, a half-dozen rappellers, a Type 1 helicopter, two helicopter air tankers and three or four hotshot crews, about 140 people in all, the fire was declared 100 percent contained after only nine days.

�To catch a 195-acre fire in Salmon Breaks is a good catch,� Skelton said. �Once they caught it, that�s when the work begins, really. Mop it up, secure it, make sure it won�t move.�

On the steep slopes of the Salmon River Breaks, he said, �We have to figure out where we�re going to operate out of. We have to have agreements with landowners where to bring in our vehicles and equipment.

�Landowners charge us $500 to $2,000 a day to use their property to defend their property. Sometimes it�s a lower price, but we have to go in and rehabilitate the ground. There are legal liabilities when you get into using other people�s property. We have a good contact list for people living along the river.�

The accident investigation report on the Cramer Fire fatalities cites the hazards of fire suppression in the Breaks: the effects of steep slopes on fire behavior, rapid uphill fire growth, rolling firebrands (pieces of burning wood), the dangers inherent in building fireline at midslope in the canyon, pronounced up slope winds in summer and the frequency of winds far different than those forecast by area meteorologists.

A briefing paper by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cites the Salmon River Breaks as �rugged and dangerous country with limited visibility.� The steep topography significantly affects fire behavior, fuels and weather, OSHA notes. �Steep slopes not only predispose areas to rapid uphill fire growth but also cause firebrands to roll downhill. Historically, a fire that burns in the Salmon River Breaks will burn to the top of the ridges and then downhill to the Salmon River because of the sheer ruggedness and steepness of the terrain.�

Although residents, rafters and anglers relish the recreational opportunities in the Breaks, the terrain is a wildland firefighter�s nightmare.

I don't know why we think everything that burns is supposed to be put out.

This.

Structure protection if any, air attack and let it come to terrain favorable to you.

Yep!

there is a lot of poop flying on the aftermath of the 19 lost on the yarnell fire here in arizona. Multiple lawsuits filed, big fines assessed against various agencies and so on. The afteraction reports are full of mismanagement, confusion, interagency squabling etc. In some cases the federal government would NOT LET companion hotshot crews be interviewed as to what happened.
You get the idea of a giant clusterf*ck that went on. It will take quite a bit of time to work it's way through the court systems, but it does not give you any confidence in the process used to fight that fire.

Who wanted to interview the companion crews? Usually until the investigation is finished the crews are supposed to stay away from public comment. The feds are usually the lead investigators on public/BLM land. They are all CF's especially in the first operational period. I don't think I've ever been completely satisfied when we have lost people and I know the last time we lost Ted Hall and Arnie Quinones we never heard who was accountable. To me there were at least 3. There is lots of ass covering going on.

Makes me thankful for fighting fires here in the east. We're "on the mountain" in my territory but barely a hill compared to what those guys face out there. I know several who have gone out west to fight some of the big fires out there & have been told that it's often more of a battle reaching the fire than actually fighting it. Godspeed to those on the line!

And in wilderness areas, one can not unlesh much of our typical technology.

I suspect we lose more fire fighters on the highways during travel than on site each year.

Not all wildfires need to be fought...

+1. One of the first questions we ask ourselves is...what happens if we do nothing?

California has one going up in the Big Sur area... that has fire personnel franticly trying to get a hold of it before the 30 to 50 mile winds come towards the end of the week.

Phil

I spent 2 summers fighting fire on the other side of the mountains from Salmon ID-Big Hole Montana. We often times got the call to hike over into Id to take on a fire that was too tough to get to from the ID side. Dry and steep country.