Something’s Happening Here

Boise (AP) — Fire officials say a light rain didn’t have much effect on a wildfire complex burning in north-central Idaho.

The 117-square-mile McGuire complex was not very active after Friday’s rain but the wet weather isn’t expected to have a significant effect in helping firefighters douse the blaze

The next few days are expected to be dry, sunny and unseasonably warm.

A Type I fire management team took over responsibility Saturday and was to hold a community meeting in Dixie.

The fire is just 10 percent contained and more than 700 people are working on it.

It’s the end of September, and the weather is warm and dry here in Salmon, Idaho.  When I stepped out onto my mother’s front porch yesterday evening, I saw a turkey vulture riding the thermals.   Nice for the bird, but he shouldn’t be here.  Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, the vultures would have headed south by now, and there would already be snow on the higher peaks.  Down by the river, ospreys still scream and dive for fish in the Salmon River.  They should be gone by now, heading south up the Lemhi.  A frost has taken out the tomatoes in the back yard, but some quirk of microclimate spared those in front.  And in my flower bed up in Leadore, this summer, the tomatoes actually survived long enough to ripen fruit.  Before this year, the gods would have seen this as a foolish taunt, and killed them in August, along with the marigolds and zinnias.  Leadore is, after all, at nearly 6,000 feet on the 45th parallel.  No one had any business trying to grow tomatoes there.  For me, planting them at all  represented the triumph of hope over experience, usually triggered by an eyes-bigger-than-stomach visit to the nursery that left me with too many plants for the Salmon garden.  What the hell, take them to Leadore, maybe we’ll get lucky.  But this year, the luck was real.  Reality is catching up with us all.

Last winter, for the first time since Bob and I moved to Leadore in 1988, the temperature never fell to 20 below zero at night, not once.   Ten below, a couple of times, but not twenty.  It’s a far cry from the 45 below zero nights of the early 1990s.  Indeed, for the last several years, it has actually rained in Salmon in December, when only snow should fall. 

Since living in Lemhi County since 1988 makes me, in the eyes of some, a newcomer, I’ve spoken to old people in the community.  “Have you ever seen it rain in Salmon in December before?” I asked a woman who had lived there for over sixty years.  “Never, never,” she said.   I ask old timers in Leadore if they remember other winters as warm.  They don’t.   They remember lots of dry winters (after all, even in a “wet” year, only 7 or 8 inches of precipitation falls on the valley floor), but never a warm one, until just recently.

 The big fires of 2000 in central Idaho, like the Clear Fire that blew down Clear Creek one afternoon and eventually ran to the headwaters of Panther Creek, gobbling up 20,000 acres per day, grew to about 250,000 acres and choked Salmon for weeks.  It was remarkable to locals for the speed and ferocity of its spread.  But by the second week of August, a little rain had fallen and the fires had slowed way down.  Twelve years later, the Mustang Fire was still burning merrily in mid-September, still capable of making long runs and putting up cumulus columns visible from fifty miles away, and is well over 350,000 acres.  If the fire had started two weeks earlier, the strong west winds would have taken it all the way up the North Fork to Lost Trail Pass.  Cool weather and a little rain last week, plus some helpful north winds, held it in the Hughes Creek drainage.  But to me the remarkable thing is that this fire season has lasted a month longer than that of 2000.  

Idaho fires — even northern Idaho fires like the McGuire complex — are becoming more like northern California fires, where many of the biggest fires were September events.  But northern California is 400 miles south of here.  In effect, Idaho has moved south.    And northern California?  Last night I found an internet photo of a house for sale in Happy Camp, where I grew up on the Klamath River.  The big selling point?  There are two palm trees in the yard.  And they are pretty darn respectable-looking palm trees, too.   No one in Happy Camp would have tried to grow a palm tree outside in the old days.  But these look as though they are there for the long haul.