Montana Fire Season Forecast: Wetter Than Expected

Montanans can expect a generally normal fire season this summer, a regional fire forecaster reported during a briefing Tuesday morning in Bozeman.

Dan Borsum, a Missoula-based forecaster at the Northern Rockies Coordinating Center, said spring moisture has blunted the impacts of a generally dismal winter snowpack in Montana. (Water supply forecasters noted in early January that half of their monitoring stations were reporting record accumulations due to a stretch of exceptionally dry weeks in November and December, but that trend later improved with the developing storms such as an early May storm that dropped several inches of precipitation in parts of the state.)

Borsum was speaking at a wildfire season outlook conference hosted by Gallatin County in coordination with other government partners, including the Custer Gallatin National Forest and Yellowstone National Park.

Borsum added that parts of the state that have suffered multiple years of precipitation deficits — northwest Montana and parts of southwest Montana in particular — are more likely to see increased potential for fire growth .

“It's really going to be a fine line [regarding] which could possibly cause larger fires this summer and which may not have any,” he said. “Things can really change in a short amount of time, like 10 days, in the Northern Rockies.”

Borsum said forecasters are calling for the El Niño weather phenomenon to shift to a La Niña pattern toward the end of summer, a faster-than-usual reversal in ocean temperature trends that causes changes widespread in air temperature and precipitation. In the northern U.S. Rockies, La Nina typically brings cooler temperatures and above-average precipitation.

Borsum also pointed out that the massive storm systems that developed this spring in California created wetter than average conditions, which could be good news for Montana by allowing the state easier access to large air tankers and other firefighting resources. which can slow the spread of a fire.

For the first time, Montana will also have exclusive use of a large helicopter – a Chinook – for the duration of the fire season. The helicopter will be available to respond to wildfires starting July 1, according to Gallatin County Fire and Emergency Management Chief Patrick Lonergan.

“Those resources don’t leave the state. They are state-owned and are specifically intended for initial attacks and prolonged attacks,” he said.

Unlike other state-contracted helicopters, the Chinook stores up to 2,500 gallons of water that it uses for airdrops in an internal tank, rather than in the bucket-and-cable configuration used by some helicopters.

“The whole mission of this program is [to] put a lot of water on a fire quickly to keep it from spreading and becoming a large fire,” Lonergan said.

Funding to ensure exclusive use of the Chinook was made available through House Bill 883, a bill passed by state lawmakers in 2023 that allows unused funds from the state's firefighting fund State to be carried over to preparation activities in a future year. Under this bill, preparedness spending may include the use of helicopters, increased crew numbers, and forest management initiatives.

During the briefing, Lonergan and others stressed the importance of keeping drones away from wildfires. For safety reasons, helicopters and planes are unable to carry out water and retardant drops or carry out reconnaissance missions if a drone is flying nearby.

Custer Gallatin National Forest spokeswoman Marna Daley noted that it is illegal to fly drones near a wildfire. All aerial resources assigned to the Shedhorn Fire south of Big Sky were grounded for a two-day period in 2021 due to the use of drones.