By daybreak, the Red Eagle fire had burned 22,000 acres and forced the evacuation of St. Mary on the eastern edge of Glacier Park.
“If you look at a topo map of Glacier Park, everything funnels southwest to northeast - and when the wind aligns with that, it can really howl through there,” said fire information officer Shannon Downey. “We were seeing torching and 200-foot flame lengths at 12:30 last night. That's extreme fire behavior.”
With forecasters warning of 50 mph gusts, the National Park Service evacuated the Cut Bank Creek campground, all Cut Bank area trails and Glacier Park's backcountry campground Atlantic Creek. The Blackfeet Tribe asked residents near Cut Bank Creek to be ready to evacuate.
U.S. Highway 89 between Browning and St. Mary remains closed, and visitors cannot enter Glacier Park from the eastern entrance.
Going-to-the-Sun Road is open from the west entrance to Rising Sun. Then visitors must turn around and go back over Logan Pass to exit the park.
Downey said the fire has primarily plowed through timber, burning fiercely in big swatches of bug-killed trees. “The dead timber really fueled the fire,” she said. “It just made things worse.”
The fire actually began on Friday above the Red Eagle campground in Glacier Park, southwest of St. Mary. Its cause remains under investigation.
“It was pretty small when it was first detected, maybe an acre in size,” Downey said. “But it grew very quickly.”
Smokejumpers were immediately dispatched, but found a 50-acre fire when they arrived on the ground.
The big run came on Saturday afternoon. At 4 p.m., firefighters estimated the flames were three hours from crossing out of Glacier Park and onto the reservation. An hour later, fire leaped over Highway 89 and took off through the timber.
Flames came within a mile of buildings in St. Mary, Downey said, and protection of the little town remained firefighters' top priority on Sunday night.
Firefighting resources were sparse, she said, with two crews available as the day began and two more crews arriving. A number of rural fire departments provided engines and water tenders to protect the town and homes.
Downey said firefighters hoped to build a bulldozer line from Highway 89 to the east, up to the top of St. Mary Ridge, then a hand line from Highway 89 to the west to tie into St. Mary Lake.
“We want to nip the fire off right there,” she said. “That's the objective - to keep the fire from continuing down the lakes.”
Sunday afternoon's winds pushed the fire into new acreage, Downey said, but the northwestern flank was slowing as it hit an area burned in 2003 and subsequently logged.
“Since it hit the edge of that old fire, it's not really going anywhere, and that's helping,” she said.
Fires were still burning, however, on both sides of Highway 89 between St. Mary and Browning, with an estimated 34 square miles of burned and still-burning timber.
Afternoon and evening winds were also fanning flames in the Bitterroot Valley, primarily on the Gash Creek fire six miles southwest of Victor.
An impressive column rose from the fire Sunday afternoon, and smoke was so heavy firefighters could not get an accurate measure of the wildfire's extent.
At last count, the Gash Creek fire had burned 1,650 acres of the Bitterroot National Forest.
Most troubling Sunday was fire behavior and growth in the Sweathouse Creek drainage, where spot fires ignited on both sides of the creek.
Winds gusted to 40 mph as the cold front crossed the Bitterroot Mountains, and prompted fire bosses to pull crews off several ridgetops because of safety concerns.
But firefighters' earlier efforts to dig hand lines did slow the fire's movement south on Sweathouse Creek, according to fire information officer Elsha Kirby.
“Now they are going to dig the line to follow the switchbacks on the road,” she said, “trying to keep the line as close to the fire as possible. We've got a couple of dozer crews and a couple of ground crews; there'll be a lot of effort through the night on the south side of the fire.”
The goal, Kirby said, is to guide the fire into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness - and away from homes lower in the Sweathouse and Gash drainages.
Ravalli County officials did evacuate residents of three homes in upper Sweathouse on Sunday afternoon, and 15 others were warned to be ready if flames spotted further down the narrow canyon.
The fire was also still burning in the Gash Creek drainage, where it started, moving primarily northwest into the wilderness.
Investigators are still looking for information on how the Gash Creek fire started. Anyone with information is asked to call the U.S. Forest Service at (406) 375-4050.
At the 1,060-acre Woodchuck fire northeast of Florence, containment lines held despite Sunday's gusty winds.
Fire information officer Terina Mullen said firefighters did see some single-tree torching as green islands of timber burned inside their containment lines.
But no spot fires were reported outside the lines, and firefighters spent the day dousing hot spots and checking their previous work.
Mullen asked residents of the Eightmile area - who have been allowed to return to their homes - to slow down as they travel roads leading to the fire. The emergency speed limit is posted at 15 mph.
“We've had a few residents driving too fast,” she said. “We need them to slow down on the road, so they can yield to the water tenders. Those big trucks can't stop that quickly.”
Firefighters finished mop-up work Sunday on the McCalla Creek fire, reported a day earlier west of Stevensville and south of St. Mary's Peak, also in the Bitterroot Valley.
That fire was held at a quarter-acre. Its cause remains under investigation.
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