“We had very favorable conditions,” said fire information officer Wayne Johnson. “With the winds turning around, the growth pretty much came to a standstill.”
Deep Draw is estimated at about 1,700 acres, and any immediate increase will likely be attributed to a back-burn intentionally sparked to rob the wildfire of fuel.
Aerial crews also worked to douse the eastern edge on Thursday, dumping from scooper planes and helicopters into “real steep, rocky, nasty country where ground crews can't get to.”
As for the fire's other flanks, “the rest of the perimeter is pretty much buttoned up,” Johnson said.
Despite winds gusting to 20 mph, temperatures soaring to near 90 and relative humidities dropping to the mid-20th percentile, fire managers are predicting full containment by Saturday evening.
“Right now,” Johnson said, “we're calling it 65 percent contained.”
The fire stretches in a long, narrow line from Highway 28 - between Elmo and Hot Springs - toward Flathead Lake. It remains several miles from the lake, however, burning through pockets of dead and downed timber, high in dry, rocky cliffs.
A smaller fire to the east - the Deep Draw II - is “completely lined,” Johnson said, “and pretty close to 100 percent out.”
Crews walked that fire Wednesday night, he said, using hand-held infrared scanners to seek out any lingering hot spots.
“We're hoping these winds will hold for a while,” Johnson said, adding that the favorable westerlies were expected to blow at least into Friday morning.
“After that, the forecast is for warm and dry, with a big high pressure moving in,” he said. “That's never a good forecast for firefighters.”
And it's surely not the forecast hoped for by crews mopping up a new blaze south of Missoula. The Davis Creek fire, a dozen air miles from town, was reported early Thursday by the Blue Mountain Lookout and quickly confirmed by aerial reconnaissance.
Two engine crews and a water-dropping helicopter from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation arrived at the quarter-acre blaze and contained its spread through grass and timber.
While the lightning-sparked fire is not out, it is not growing, either.
Nor are most of the other small fires in the region, with national forests reporting successful initial-attack efforts following recent lightning storms.
In fact, far fewer such storms have blown across the state than in recent years, and that, coupled with a cooler and wetter early summer, means far less fire activity. To date, the state has spent about $2 million fighting wildfires, compared to about $50 million last year, according to an Associated Press report released Thursday.
The season, however, is not yet over, and land managers remain concerned that the apparent lack of fire has resulted in some careless behavior.
On the Lolo National Forest, firefighters have responded to 94 fires so far this season, with 58 of those caused by people. State land managers have seen a similarly high percentage of human-caused fires on their forests.
“So far, we've been very lucky,” said DNRC's Mike Kopitzke. “I think that having the reminder of the Mount Sentinel fire and a rather persistent public information campaign has helped.”
Still, Kopitzke encouraged “people to be extra careful with their campfires and activities in the woods.”
And while most recent fires are contained, controlled or completely doused, the whiff of smoke serves as a reminder that in some areas, blazes continue to burn.
Firefighters are monitoring three small backcountry fires - all not much more than a few acres in size - on the Flathead National Forest and one in Glacier National Park, allowing them to burn for ecological reasons.
Those include the Wildrose fire in the Great Bear Wilderness; the Shale Mountain fire in the Bob Marshall Wilderness; the high-elevation Triangle fire in the Great Bear Wilderness; and the Meteka fire in Glacier Park, located between the Camas and Inside North Fork roads, north of Columbia Falls.
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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