Mann Gulch

On August fifth, nineteen forty-nine, a fire started in the Gates of the Mountains wilderness along the Missouri River north of Helena. By early afternoon it had grown enough that the Forest Service dispatched fifteen smokejumpers from Missoula. They parachuted into the gulch that afternoon and linked up with one forest guard already on the ground.

What happened next was reconstructed years later through physical evidence and the testimony of the three survivors. The fire that the crew had spotted from the air on the north-facing slope crossed the gulch and ignited the south-facing hillside below them: dry grass, steep grade, and an uphill wind. The slope caught all at once. The fire moved faster than any of the men had seen before. Crew foreman Wagner Dodge shouted for his men to drop their tools and run. He then did something none of the others understood: he stopped, lit a match, and set a small fire in the grass ahead of him. He lay down in the ash of the fire he had just set as the larger fire roared over him. He survived. Thirteen of the sixteen men on the ground did not. Two others survived by finding a crevice in the canyon wall and pressing into it.

Wagner Dodge's technique, what fire behavior scientists now call an escape fire, was not understood at the time and was not adopted as doctrine for decades. The Mann Gulch fire changed how the Forest Service trained crews, how it studied fire behavior, and how it communicated risk. Missoula became home to the Fire Sciences Laboratory as a direct result.

Norman Maclean spent years investigating the fire and the men who died in it. He was working on the manuscript when he died in nineteen ninety. His book, Young Men and Fire, was published posthumously in nineteen ninety-two and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The gulch is accessible by boat. The crosses marking the places where the men fell are still there.