Jerry Burns, Tom Leibscher, and Byron Bonney flew into the Middle Fork around Sept. 9, 1988 to search for the mules Burns turned loose before climbing Crow Peak to escape the fire Sept. 6, 1988.
The swirling, twisted smoke column from the Canyon Creek Fire Sept. 6, 1988 when it made its historic run as taken from Silverking Lookout.
Crow Peak in the right center of the photo.
"I took off and rode up the main line trail and into the Lander's Fork trail. That's where I hit the [Canyon Creek] fire. It was roaring pretty good then," said Jerry Burns recalling Sept. 6, 1988. "Some logs were burning in the trail and so I knew I had to keep going."
Burns was working as a mule packer for the Forest Service in Lincoln, Mont. during the summer of 1988. His actions saved two trail crew members from being overrun by the Canyon Creek fire that burned more than 200 square miles in a single night.
The morning of Sept. 6, the fire behavior specialist for the Canyon Creek fire warned Burns that the predicted weather could cause fire behavior that had never been seen before.
Byron Bonney, who was working for the Forest Service in Lincoln at the time, was in his office when Burns came in and asked him if he thought the trail crew up the Middlefork was in danger.
"I knew where the fire was positioning itself so I told him we needed to get them out of there because this was going to be a big burn day," Bonney wrote in a personal memoir. "We tried getting ahold of the two trail crew members on the radio but couldn't raise them."
Burns took matters into his own hands. He grabbed a radio, ran out the door, jumped in his pickup, to which he had already hitched his horse trailer, and headed for the Indian Meadows trailhead to warn the two trail crew workers, who were 14 miles in on the trail.
When Burns reached the two men on the trail crew, the roar of the fire was so loud, they had to yell to be able to hear one another. The group went to Blacktail Pass, where the fire roared over them, dangerously close.
Because of his familiarity with the terrain in the area, Burns knew of a nearby rockslide where he thought they would probably be safe. The men unloaded their packs, let the mules free to fend for themselves and climbed to the rockslide, near Cold Peak. They were able to hear radio chatter from Augusta where the fire was also raging and communicate with the office in Lincoln.
Barry Hicks, who was working on a Type 1 Incident Management Team out of Lincoln at the time, said they told the men to stay where they were and planned a way to rescue them in the morning.
"We were listening on the radio during the night. We knew they were in a good location and they were gonna be able to make it through the fire," Hicks said.
The next day, Hicks and Bonney were flown via helicopter up to the mountain to rescue Burns and the trailcrew. Although the time Burns spent in Vietnam made him wary of helicopters, he said that climbing into the helicopter on Cold Peak was a huge relief.
As they flew over the mountains, Hicks said it looked like a moonscape, with no animals or vegetation in sight. However, the mules survived and were rescued a few days later.
Had Burns not reached them the men on the trail crew, they would have died in the fire.
"Jerry was a hero for riding up there," Hicks said. "Not many people would have known that country well enough to know where they could go safely."
Reader Comments(0)