I found your article upon arriving home just an hour ago from Montana here to Florida. My fascination with the Front continues, in fact I was there just yesterday hiking at Pine Butte near Ear Mountain and doing some glassing. The fact that all you good Montana people debate and discuss forest issues ensures that you care. As an observer who is envious of what you have, my hat is off to you. I hope that if all goes as planned I can spend many days in and around the BM and L&C hiking and appreciating those forests as you all do. Keep up the great work!

I bet it would suprise you how much was spent protecting the small Indian Point and Pretty Praire USFS cabins, FWP cabin at head of Gibson Lake, the extremely small USFS cabin at Wrong Creek–a replacement for one that burned earlier, USFS cabin at the head of the Middle Fork Flathead, the Sabido cabin in Birch Creek and the USFS West Fork of Teton Cabin. Also how much was spent protecting the paved airstrip at Benchmark, one of the most dangerous strips ever built in MT with 1964 flood dollars. The fires never got close to Letterman’s place–he has others here in MT so won’t freeze out or suffer badly in case you are losing sleep over him.

Probably they figured they could get away with burning up a lot of USFS land but would have trouble with the Klick private dude ranch at the head of Gibson Lake and private cabins, Teton ski run, other dude ranches and livestock ranches. The present ranger was probably very aware that the ranger who allowed the 288,000 Canyon Creek fire to burn out lots of private land south of Augusta in 1988 lost his job. The USFS paid heavy mitigation for ranch fences, timber and structures burned then. I understand there was excellent growth of very good bunch grass.

We need better tree management both within and outside classified wilderness. Indians did a good job of managing both areas. It has occurred to me that there are many draft horse people with stock and eager to train new people and sell them horses and mules. We have many Indian reservations with well trained firefighters who would probably love to have good restoration forestry jobs for several months a year. There are three prisons and many jails with prisoners who would probably benefit from the hard work of thinning, slash piling etc. We need to start managing all the forests and quit pouring tax money down the black holes of catastrophic fire fighting. A detailed breakdown of all the expenses should be published by the USFS.

When I was a kid my dad was stationed at Malmstrom, and we spent lots of time at Gibson and around the Sun River area. Since then, mostly on dawn to dark rushed day drives from the west side, I have been up to Blackleaf several times, always wishing I had more time to explore. Got a good look at the old burnout, as well as the gas infrastructure that now exists, and it is pretty inconspicuous.

There are proposals from the usual suspects to run the wilderness boundary all the way to the east edge of the L&C NF. Gas development aside, given the terrain and the fire escapement problem, I feel that is not appropriate at all. There is a real need for induced fire programs and active fuelbreaking on the Front, as there is nearly everywhere on the NF system. And these programs need to be cost-effective, i.e. allowing mechanized means of fire and fuels management. At the very least, chain saw work is required to prepare areas for prescriptive burning. Wilderness designation would prevent all that, and lead to more high-severity, devastating fires.

A cost-effective program using the 40 million dollars (it cost to fight/observe this year’s L&C NF fires) for fuels management and precribed burning over several years would have had a much better net result that these woofool fires.