Missoula County stays at high fire danger despite recent rain

With vegetation looking wet, wildfire may not have seemed like an immediate concern. Fire managers said the bigger issue was how long that moisture would matter once conditions started to change.

Forest Service officials said the storms produced narrow bands of rain, so one place could get a downpour while another 10 or 20 miles away got nothing. They explained that smaller vegetation lost moisture first.

“So fine fuels like grasses, pine needles, leaves, that sort of thing. Really. Within an hour of a rainstorm, they could be available to burn again because they're really sensitive to that change, whether it's getting moisture or drying out,” said Melanie Hopgood, fire prevention tech for the Missoula Ranger District in the Lolo National Forest.

The Lolo National Forest recently authorized fuels-reduction work across more than 87,000 acres over the next 20 years. That work included prescribed burning, hand thinning and some mechanized treatments.

DNRC said western Montana was still seeing fire starts, but moisture and aggressive initial attack had helped keep most of them small. The agency also said Missoula County remained at high fire danger.

“Some of them are packing a punch, you know, a half inch to an inch of rain where you go two miles down the road and it's a trace of rain. So they're very isolated,” said Karl Nikoleyczik, area fire management officer for the DNRC Southwestern Land Office.

More than 75 percent of wildfires in Missoula County were human-caused, Hopgood said. That made fully extinguished campfires and secured tow chains especially important as crews watched how quickly fuels dried out.