Mann Gulch Fire of 1949

In the early 1940s, the U.S. Forest Service created an elite team of smokejumpers who parachuted into remote wildfires, which turned sadly tragic on August the 5th, 1949, when on a broiling hot day twenty miles from Helena Montana, a fire was reported in Mann Gulch.

In response, 15 smokejumpers—most between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, flew 120 miles from Missoula to attack the fire from the ground. Landing safely at 4:10 p.m., they hiked down into Mann Gulch with their heavy packs and Pulaski axes strapped to their backs, splitting into smaller units for the attack on the reported grass fire.

Mann Gulch Disaster

Their plan was to fight the fire with the Missouri River and a tributary creek to their backs, which would also second as their escape route, but when they forded the creek, they found themselves trapped by a wall of flames 30 feet high. The fire had a tailwind of 30 to 40 miles an hour, and since their only escape route was up and over a 76 percent mountain grade, they found themselves heavily burdened with their equipment, as well as trapped by rapidly advancing flames moving at seven miles an hour.

Ten young smokejumpers would perish shortly before 6:00 p.m., while five made it over the top of the ridge by abandoning their heavy packs and axes. Two survivors would later pass away from their burns.

What is an Escape Fire?

33-year-old Foreman Wag Dodge would create a brush fire tactic now know as an “escape fire.” Nearing 6:00 p.m., with the fire just minutes from burning him alive, Dodge lit a backfire up the hill he needed to climb, and as his back fire burned the grass in his intended escape route, he walked into it, covered his face with a wet towel and laid down face first on the ground. Dodge heard and felt the main fire passing by on either side of him, but he survived the ordeal miraculously unscathed.

Young Men and Fire

Until that moment, there had been no history of a firefighter having done such a maneuver, but escape fires are now considered an accepted strategy in the fight against grass fires. Dodge’s survival so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, author of A River Runs Through It, that he wrote a second book about the Mann Gulch Fire, entitled Young Men and Fire, making the Mann Gulch Fire a tragic yet pioneering event in firefighting history.