Bigfork fire veteran Rick Trembath reflects on how fire shaped the community

Driving up Chapman Hill Road in Bigfork you’d probably never see the small piece of history.

The stump from an old Ponderosa Pine tree is over 100 years old, and its blackened, scoured-out side tells the story of how wildfire was once a part of the Bigfork landscape. Scars inside the black section of the tree reveal how low-intensity fires moved through the area about every five to 10 years. Looking closely at the scars you then see something else starting about 100 years ago: the lack of fire.

With the arrival of settlers wildfire began to have a different role in society. While native Americans used fire to enhance landscape and grazing, American settlers began extinguishing fires. 

Just up the road from the blackened stump, a couple of homes sit atop the hill, surrounded by tall trees. One home is well protected from wildfire, with trees cleared a few hundred feet away from the home. But another house nearby may not survive a wildfire as easily as its neighbor. The home has tall trees growing up close to it, and a deep bed of pine needles carpeting the landscape. Rick Trembath knows what the before and after photo of this home would look like, should wildfire spread through here, and that is not a pretty picture.

Trembath has fought fire as a structure firefighter for Bigfork Volunteer Fire Department and he has been a wildland firefighter for over 33 years. He retired from a career in forestry at the Swan River Ranger District in Bigfork. He spent his summer this year as a safety officer on three fires in the Swan Valley.

Trembath was on the Wedge Canyon fire in the North Fork of the Flathead in 2003. He watched as some homes were lost to the roaring wildfire, while other homes were able to be saved.

Trembath spent one memorable night inside the home of a family in the North Fork while the two-mile wide front of a wildfire raged around them. The land surrounding home had been cleared properly, so the home itself was not in much danger, Trembath said. 

Fire has been a part of the Bigfork area for centuries. Photographs from the early 1900s show how the hills around Bigfork were fairly barren of trees. Chapman Hill in the early 1900s was a grassy landscape with a few sparse Ponderosa; that’s a big change to what it is now, with stands of pine and fir covering the hillside.

The east shore of Flathead Lake often burned historically. Trembath said if you look in the forests you can see evidence. “There is charcoal everywhere around Bigfork,” he said.

Trembath said wildfires are only going to get bigger, as society puts less emphasis on forest management. 

“There is a tremendous fuel load out there that is going to burn,” Trembath said. “I have no doubt that some day we’re not going to be successful at initial attack.”

But he said that after this year, forest management, in the urban interface at least, could begin to shift. “The more houses you lose to wildland fire the more you are going to see a managed approach to forests,” Trembath said.

Living with fire has changed also. The Firewise program is a national effort to help homeowners in the wildland urban interface prepare and protect their homes. It was a major effort nationwide up until about 2007, when its interest seemed to wane. Now after a big fire year in California, Trembath said efforts about home protection in the wildland interface will become a hot topic again. “People tend to lose emphasis on this, but it will come up in a big way in California,” he said. “It’s always one thing to be told about fires, it’s another thing to see it. There’s going to be a lot more interest in fuels reduction as a result of some bad experiences this summer.”

People who live in the forest interface need to be prepare their homes for catastrophic fires. That means clearing a defensible space around their homes that can slow a fast-moving fire. The home that Trembath stayed in during the Wedge Canyon fire in the North Fork of the Flathead was a good example of how the property owner prepared for a catastrophic fire event. The trees stood charred around the home, but the home survived.

“You need to manage the landscape entirely, not just clear-cut a donut around your house,” he said.

There are areas on Swan Hill near Bigfork that Trembath said are ripe for fires. People are living on a steep hillside, with dense forest surrounding their homes. Since the predominant fire pattern is west to east, homes with heavy forests to the west of them are especially at risk, he said.

The Half Moon fire in 1929 took out much of the area north of Columbia Falls and Hungry Horse. A 1921 fire started near the Bigfork dam and spread through the Jewel Basin.

With heavy initial attacks most small fires these days don’t blow up into major ones. This year’s initial attack is what kept northwest Montana from becoming a disaster this year, Trembath said. “We actually had a good year,” he said. “The initial attack was successful.”

Trembath will have a presentation on wildland fire Oct. 7 at the Bigfork Fire Department as part of National Fire Prevention Week. The time was not available as of press time.