My second favorite state is burning, and close to my beloved Glacier National Park.
Highway 2, the major route across the southern boundary of the park, was closed to traffic. It is now open, but the vehicles are being escorted across Marias Pass as the fire is only about a mile away. (Note: Marias Pass is the lowest elevation pass across the United States Rocky Mountains.)
The Number 1 Montana fire is burning near Gates of the Mountain Wilderness, an area immortalized in Lewis & Clark's diaries. This area was the site of the terrible Mann Gulch fire in 1949, in which 13 firefighters lost their lives. Norman Maclean's last book was Young Men and Fire, an accounting of this terrible tragedy. (Norman Maclean's most famous book is A River Runs Through It.) On our trip to Montana in 2003 Mom and I visited this beautiful area.
6 comments:
Bushfire is a terrible thing, although it can often be beneficial to the land itself. It wasn't that long ago that a fair chunk of Victoria was on fire - I remember it was kind of a scary time.
I hope Montana recovers for you Shirl.
I keep trying to tell myself that it is good for the land and such. But man! these are two great wonderful places. West Glacier was burning when we were there in 2003. . . it is amazing what it does to the sky and the air. *sigh*
Every time this sort of thing happens, my heart just breaks and I mourn the loss of so much beauty.
It's a temporary loss though. Stuff grows back. Provided the developers and loggers stay away that is.
Sometimes the loggers make the point that what they do keeps the amount of fuel for these fires at a lower level. It's all too complex. And though it does grow back, the number of years it takes to revegetate is more than I have left. *sigh*
Fire is a natural cleaner-out. Logging isn't. Let them log plantation trees and leave the forests alone.
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