The fury of the Sundance Fire

SANDPOINT — Every time Jim Wood ventures into the Pack River drainage, he’s taken back 50 years to the Sundance Fire.

A young Cat operator at the time, he was contracted by the U.S. Forest Service and sent to the Sundance area to help build a fire line. Wood only got a few miles up, just behind a few Cats farther up the ridge, when a Forest Service rig pulled up and told him the fire had crested the ridge and to get the heck out. He drove down, back to the Hellroaring Creek area, and turned around to look at the mountain.

“I looked up that ridge and the fire was on that ridge,” Wood told the crowd gathered near the Pack River Bridge, near where the Sundance made its 2,000-acre overnight run 50 years ago. “It was pretty much like you were looking at the sun right now to see where the actual flames were. That fire was at least 1,000 feet in the air and the sound, the racket, the roar was the loudest you ever heard, it was like 100 jets.”

By the time it was out, the Sundance Fire burned nearly 56,000 acres in August and September of 1967. The lightning-caused fire ignited near the Sundance Mountain Lookout tower overlooking Priest Lake. Strong winds on Sept. 1 created a firestorm that blew the fire across the Selkirk Divide and into the Pack River drainage. In a matter of eight hours the fire consumed a swath of timber 8 miles wide and 16 miles in length.

Saturday’s commemoration was the third event — the first two were in Priest Lake and Bonners Ferry — held to remember the fire and its impact and pay tribute to the two firefighters, Lee Collins and Luther Rodarte, who were killed near McCormick Creek when they were overrun by the fire.

A plaque will be placed at the site it’s believed the two lost their lives and an interpretive sign will be placed closer to the trailhead to honor Rodarte, a dozer boss, and Collins, a dozer operator.

“Sundance Fire and the Trapper Peak Fire will forever be remembered as some of the most significant natural disasters in the history of Idaho,” Tom Schultz, director of the Idaho Department of Lands in Boise told the more than 100 people gathered deep in the Pack River drainage. “I want to extend my condolences to the family members and friends of Luther Rodarte and Lee Collins. Regardless of the passage of time, I’m sure the pain of losing those folks is still felt strongly. We saw those emotions yesterday and we honor their sacrifice and yours.”

Another man, a young lookout just a few weeks out of high school, narrowly escaped a similar fate when he took refuge in a small snowbank under a wet blanket.

On the morning of Sept. 1, 1967, Randy Langston was 7 or 8 miles away from the fire front. At that point the fire was burning on the west side of the Selkirk Crest Divide in the Priest Lake drainage and the thinking was the fire would stay on that side of the divide. If it did make it to the crest, the thinking was the rocky, scabby land with minimal fuel would stall the fire long enough for crews to catch up to it and knock it back.

Langston reported he could see little of the fire itself, with smoke from the Trapper Peak fire clogging the air. During the day, the fire made a steady march up the Priest Lake side of the Pack River drainage and by nightfall, Langston was told to evacuate the lookout. By then, Langston could see flames entering the drainage but when he tried to hike out Apache Ridge, where crews would meet him in the Fault Creek drainage and take him to safety, he realized his escape route had been cut off by the fire. He retreated back to the lookout where he found a remnant patch of snow under a ledge and huddled under the wet blanket.

When he talked to him in the mid-1970s, retired Idaho Department of Lands employee Bill Love said Langston matter-of-factly told the tale and then kind of chuckled and said, “That was my last day working for the U.S. Forest Service.”

Fire isn’t new to the area, said Matt Butler, fire management officer for Sandpoint, Bonners Ferry and Priest Lake ranger districts. In fact, the history goes back centuries.

“You look at late 1880s through 1925, you look at a fire history map, most of the area that is in North Idaho was touched by fire,” Butler told the crowd. “And that’s only since we started records. You go back further than that, every acre, every piece of land was touched by fire in North Idaho.”

The period from 1880 to the early 1920s was active firewise, with more than 11,000 acres burning some years. In 1926, 115,000 acres burned on the Priest Lake district — more than a third of its acreage. The year was an active fire season in the Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry areas as well.

However, the period from 1940 to 1966 was a cool, wet period with the largest fire estimated around 300 acres. Then, in 1966-’67, it was an average winter, with normal snowfall and precipitation; spring was also fairly average. While it rained on June 22, it would be the last wetting rain until mid-September. Humidity levels were below average, with humidity hovering around 8-12 percent in mid-August leading up to Sundance.

“When we go back and look at the weather record, and look at the significance of it, it’s extremely hot and dry,” Butler said. “And that period, we’re still looking at it as the hottest, driest period we’ve seen in nearly a century.”

On Aug. 11, a dry storm came through and lightning strikes started fires on Trapper Peak, Kaniksu Mountain and a few other places. Trapper Creek, the biggest at that point, burned more than 16,000 acres and had more than 2,000 men fighting the fire at its peak. The Kaniksu Mountain Fire, northwest of Trapper Peak near the Canadian border, burns between 600-700 acres and had 500 men fighting it.

Then came Sundance.

The first few fires from the Aug. 11 storm were put out right away with the largest hitting 2 acres. A fourth fire was detected Aug. 20 and also was extinguished. Another cold dry front came through with winds blowing 25-30 mph on Aug. 23 and a fifth fire was detected, 200 yards from the lookout tower.

The fire reached 35 acres and the crews thought they’d caught it, Butler said. Then another cold front blew through on Aug. 29 and the fire jumped the containment line and was out of control. The fire pushed southwest toward Priest Lake, making a 200-acre crowning downhill run. Over the next few days, the fire grew and, by Aug. 31, it was 4,000 acres and Coolin was evacuated.

“People are talking about putting their valuables on boats and going to the islands, getting to the docks and ready to jump on if they need to,” Butler said. “The fire gets within a mile of the town.”

From this end, the trail goes up to Fault Lake, up McCormick Creek where Rodarte and Collins and other dozer crews worked on a fire line in case the fire came across. It was hot, it was dry and weather forecast said the winds were expected to hit 15-20 mph, then 20-25 mph.

The fire picked up speed, hitting a mile-plus per hour, Butler said, adding normally, a fast-moving fire in the region’s fuel type would be 1/8 of a mile per hour. By 4 p.m., the crest stalled the spread and crews were hoping they’d caught the fire.

By 6 p.m., the rising heat from the fire mixed with the weather-related wind, causing fire-induced winds of 80 mph, causing massive timber blow-downs and adding to the fire’s fuel load. While the fire slowed to 1 mph, its intensity and the wind started throwing spot fires ahead of the main blaze, right near where Collins, Rodarte and other dozer crews were working.

“We don’t know what Collins and Rodarte were thinking because they didn’t have a radio, we didn’t have direct communication with them but they probably recognized that they were not in a good spot,” he said. “There are spot fires below them burning the hill, the main fire coming at their back. We believe they tried to get out.”

By 6-7 p.m., winds hit 52 mph on the ridge tops and, as the fire picked up speed, so did the fire-induced winds — estimated at 120 mph. By now, conditions at the Pack River Bridge are a firestorm — trees blown down, the mountain on fire and the fire intensity rising.

The convection column, which normally goes straight up, was pushed over by the 40-50 mph winds. In a normal fire, long-range spotting is a half-mile to a mile. In Sundance, some spot fires were thrown 10 miles away.

Around 7 p.m., Apache Ridge “basically blows up,” Butler said, and a rescue mission was sent to get the firefighters out of the drainage near McCormick Creek.

“They talk about driving out seeing a little bit of smoke down here and looked in rearview mirror a few minutes later and the whole hillside was on fire,” he said.

At its peak, officials estimate one section — 640 acres — went up in about three to six minutes. By then the fire was moving an incredible 6 mph, the column was leaning over and was rotating “like a fire tornado,” Butler said.

At 9 p.m., the fire reached Roman Nose, moving 2 1/2 mph. By 10 p.m., it reached Caribou Creek and slowed to 1 1/2 mph as the main fire struggled to push through the spot fires. By 11 p.m., as humidity rose and winds died down, Sundance quit its run.

On Sept. 3, IDL offiicials sent a message to the state after another fire started near Caribou Creek on the Priest Lake Fire.

“At this point the state is near the point of helplessness,” Butler read from the memo. “Our people have now worked night and day, many of them since the 14th of August. They’ve worked 18-20 hours a day and in some cases around the clock. We’ve spent or obligated all of our suppression and emergency funds. At this point, we are on our knees.”

A Forest Service overhead team was sent and crews caught the Caribou Creek fire before it could connect with the Trapper or Sundance fires, something that would likely have wiped out much of the Priest Lake and Kaniksu National Forest.

An incredible amount of energy was released by the fire, with Sundance considered to the one of the hottest, fastest fires ever recorded. Some estimates placed the amount of energy expended every 10 minutes as similar to an atomic bomb, Schultz said.

In the days immediately following the fire, rehabilitation and reforestation efforts were launched. Of the four major fires — Sundance, Trapper Peak, Kaniksu Mountain and Flume Creek, only Sundance was determined to have major rehabilitation needs. A recommendation was made to grass seed 31,000 acres of Forest Service and IDL lands for watershed protection, soil stabilization and habitat, said Don Gunter, retired USFS silviculturist.

Roughly 777,600 pounds of seeds — spread primarily by air — were dropped in the area between October and November and, over the course of several years, more than 5 million seedlings would be planted. However, an unfortunate side effect was a booming mouse population that would threaten the young seedlings planted following the fire. Poisoned oats had to be used to bring the mice under control.

The total fire bill for Idaho was $4 million back in 1967, with more than half attached to the Trapper Peak and Sundance fires. In today’s dollars, Schultz said the cost would be in the $30 million range.

An estimated 49 million board feet were lost of federal lands and on the state side, 67 million board feet — 42 million in the Sundance Fire and 25 million on Trapper Creek. Timber salvage operations were quickly put together to try and recover as much lumber as possible — of the 14 sales put together by October, about 30 million board feet were recovered, most from Trapper Creek, IDL’s Mick Schanilec said.

“I’ve had a chance to really study and talk to a lot of people, look at a lot of miles,” he said. “The thing that really strikes me about the Sundance Fire is it really laid a foundation for interagency cooperation in North Idaho and I’ve had to good fortune for my whole career to benefit from that.”

The fires also connected the three communities — Priest Lake, Sandpoint and Bonners Ferry — in a way not seen before, and the lessons learned from the Sundance Fire are still being taught today.

“What we look at from fire behavior standpoint today, we’re still teaching the Sundance Fire. We’re still teaching the fire behavior. We still look at it and recently, nationally, there’s been a lot of large, devastating fires that have grown tremendously and quickly, that burned hot, and those comparisons go back to Sundance. The Sundance Fire is still used nationally to compare how fires are looked at and their significance across the country today.

The Sundance led to a strengthened commitment to the state’s fire program as well as additional money appropriated for fire equipment, trucks, and training. The fire’s legacy extended to rehabilitation and reforestation, with projects or natural effort required within five years of a timber harvest.

With conditions similar to those 50 years ago, there is a worry that a similar fire could happen again.

Jim Peterson of The Evergreen Foundation said he recalls watching the fire’s eerie red glow from the swimming dock at Hill’s Resort on the west side of Priest Lake with his dad, watching the fire’s eerie, eerie red glow at the top of Sundance Mountain. He has spent the last 50 years writing, including the past 31 of those years in pretty intensive study of forests in the western United States.

The trend is toward more fires, more frequent fires and bigger fires and eventually, he said he fears a repeat of the 1910 fire, which burned than 3 million acres of old growth in northern Idaho and western Montana —most over a period of two days and nights.

“Idaho has not experienced a fire of the magnitude of the 1910 fire since that time,” he said. “I think we’re way overdue.”