WEST GLACIER - For the first time in years, Elaine Petersen enjoyed a quiet and peaceful summer day at her family's cabin on the shores of Lake Five.
The chatter of an angry squirrel was the loudest sound on the lake, which was oddly still beneath a hazy blue sky.
"I guess everybody pulled out," she said Tuesday. "It's so still."
Just as it was still on Monday night, after firefighters called for an evacuation of the area. The Robert fire was bearing down on nearby West Glacier, and fire bosses sparked a burnout of their own to steer the flames away from homes.
"I was up every two hours last night to watch the fire," Petersen said. "There was a beautiful orange light reflecting on the water. You could see the trees burning in the dark."
But the Petersens, like many others, stayed put, signing a waiver acknowledging they, like several hundred others, had been warned of the danger.
"It was like a slumber party," said one resident of West Glacier, who, with a couple neighbors, remained at her home along the community's golf course. "There were only about eight of us left on the whole street, and we stayed up late watching the fire. We were out there playing golf in our nightgowns."
The flames they watched from the greens were not, however, the flames of the Robert fire. Instead, they were the flames from a burnout ignited by the Alaskan Type I incident command team in charge of corralling Robert.
"The fire was throwing up a pretty big column," said fire information officer Tom Kempton. "It was sending quite an ember storm showering down into the flats around West Glacier."
And so crews sparked a fire of their own up an adjacent creek drainage. That burnout blaze swept up the steep drainage, creating a hot draft behind it. Essentially, the creek bed became a chimney, and the plume from the Robert fire bent back against the wind and sucked up the chimney.
"It was perfect," said firefighter Jim Butler. "We walked it right up the mountain, just as planned." It worked so well, in fact, that the fire - which Kempton said was "making a pretty aggressive run toward town" - stalled at just 12,150 acres, far short of late-evening estimates.
Tuesday morning, crews were given another burnout opportunity with low temperatures (mid-80s), high humidity (20 percent), and cooperative winds (light and upslope).
After soaking a six-mile line with water and retardant, helicopters dropped fire along Glacier Park's Camas Road to the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, creating a half circle of flame around Apgar Mountain.
The idea, Butler said, was to once again pull the fire in a northerly direction, as well as to burn up fuels, creating a black spot between the fire and the homes.
But the trick, he said, was to first create a defensible space so their burnout would not turn back on them.
"They put a god-awful lot of water and retardant down before they started burning," he said, soaking a line between the flames and the houses.
For three solid hours, he said, helicopters and retardant planes pounded the line with hundreds of thousands of gallons.
"Every time you looked up, you saw them dropping again," Butler said. "It was constant."
If the burnout smolders as planned overnight, he said, much of the six-mile wide swath between the North Fork Road and the Camas Road will be charred by morning.
"We're talking 10 or 12 square miles," he said. "Maybe 6,000 or 8,000 acres. That green you see" - he motioned toward the slopes of Apgar Mountain from his perch along Highway 2 near West Glacier - "all that green, from the river up, it's going. It's going up in smoke."
No one wants to toast a chunk of scenic national park, he said, "but so far, the pro-active measures we're taking are working out just the way we'd like them to."
"The burnouts have gone very, very well," agreed fire information officer Andy Williams. "Generally, the area around Apgar is pretty well protected now. There is very little fuel left between the fire and Apgar Village."
Another burnout is planned for Wednesday morning, along the southern flank of Apgar Mountain.
"They need to do that to protect West Glacier," said Williams, "and they need to do it before some westerly winds kick in."
His Alaskan firefighting team, he said, has a long history of with burnouts, and has more experience than just about anyone else when it comes to using big fires to fight big fires. An 8,000-acre burnout is nothing, Butler said, to a team accustomed to sparking blazes in excess of 50,000 acres.
It is an impressive sight, however, especially to folks who, from their lakeshore lookout, cannot discern the difference between a wildfire and a burnout.
"It all looks like fire to me," Elaine Petersen said. "We moved the wood pile away from the cabin, cleared some brush, packed up a few treasures. We've got a hose hooked up, not that it's going to do a whole lot of good in a forest fire."
If worse comes to worst, she said, they take the boat out into the lake. Down by the shore, she said, stands a granite bird bath, a memorial to her father, who bought the lakeshore property 30 years ago and died last winter.
"If all this goes," she says, "at least that granite will still be here."
Next Sunday, she said, relatives are planning to arrive at the cabin for a memorial service in honor of her father.
"Whatever they do," she said of the firefighters, "I hope it works."
As do the folks way over on the other end of the Robert fire, well west of Glacier Park in the Spoon Lake area eight miles north of Columbia Falls.
Tuesday, while efforts were concentrated on Robert's eastern flank and the big burnout, the western edge flared, sending a column high above the valley as fire sped up Kimmerly Creek. The concern, said fire information officer Andy Williams, is that the fire - which has once already threatened homes near Spoon Lake before moving off to the northeast - might circle back around and park due west of the homes there.
"It's burning well past our perimeter lines by now," Williams said late Tuesday, "so we're going to have to reassess and figure out what we're going to do next."
The first thing they're going to do, he said, is to "fall back on a new line. After that, we'll just have to wait and see what old Mother Nature has up her sleeve."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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