Local forester authors book on wildland fires and wildland firefighting

by Michael Howell

Wildland fires are always a hot topic in the Bitterroot valley, it seems. Especially following the fire storms of 2000. For all those interested in the topic, “Fire in the Hole: A Forester’s Look at the World of Wildland Firefighting” by Mark Lewing and David Shouldice is a must read. 

The book is not just a tome about wildland fires and firefighting, it is, more or less, an autobiography as well. Lewing, who leaves near Stevensville, began his sixty-year career as a professional forester while earning a degree in Timber Management at the University of Montana and working summers for the U.S. Forest Service. Following four years in the Air Force, he began working for the next 31 years for the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, most of that time as the Hamilton Unit Manager. He continues doing forestry work on his own, thinning and planting trees for landowners to this day. He said he’s worn out several chainsaws over the years and has himself thinned about a total of two-and-a-half sections of land doing small jobs and planted close to 50,000 trees. 

“In all that time working for the state, my job description only contained one sentence that read ‘fire duty as needed’,” said Lewing, “but especially in the old days it was a case of, if you worked for the Office of the State Forester, you fought fires.” His book gives you an overview in four parts and 65 pages of color photos of that long adventure.

The first part of the book takes you through his early years of fighting fires for the Forest Service and the State of Montana as a ground-pounding employee with part of the job being routine firefighting that later branched out into freelance firefighting for Incident Command Teams all over Montana and half a dozen other states. The reader gets a peek into the social world of firefighting as Lewing recounts his many adventures, frustrations, and fun times as he works at a variety of jobs that range from down and dirty line digging, to higher supervisory positions, to support jobs.

He expands upon his own experiences by adding the voice of a casual acquaintance and now a good friend, David A. Shouldice, whom he met while fighting the Skalkaho Complex Fire during the fires of 2000. Shouldice, a nineteen-year veteran of the firefighting world at the time, was on assignment as a crew boss for Ontario, Canada fire crews who later shared his own written account of those times with Lewing. Lewing found the account so compelling that he decided to include it in his book.    

In his own account of the Firestorm of 2000, Lewing describes arriving in the Bitterroot on August 2 and heading up towards the Valley Complex Fire Camp and standing slack-jawed in the parking lot as he counted six major fires, all with giant convection columns. There were columns from the Blodgett Trail, Burke Gulch, Bear Gulch, Maynard, Gilbert, and Spade fires arced across the horizon. He said on August 6, which he calls “Black Sunday,” they all blew up and converged into one fire called the Bear Fire and moved east into the Big Hole. Before it was over, the fire complex had scorched over 350,000 acres.    

“It was my unit that was burning up,” said Lewing. “It was a very frustrating experience. Out of 14,000 acres of state land, we managed to save 2,000.”

The book is about more than fires and firefighting, though, it is also about dealing with the aftermath, and documents the monumental salvage and rehabilitation efforts undertaken in the several years following the Firestorm of 2000 to reverse the destruction inflicted on state lands, in particular the Sula Forest, the Hamilton Unit that Lewing was responsible for. 

“This event was the largest conflagration of Montana State Lands, the largest salvage of fire-killed timber, and the largest rehabilitation effort in state history,” said Lewing.

In the epilogue to the book, titled “The Last Word,” Lewing gets around to offering his own personal observations and opinions of how the world of firefighting has changed and how it could possibly be improved. He uses the Lolo Peak Fire of 2017 to illustrate his points.

“The chapter is not meant as a finger pointing diatribe,” said Lewing, “but as a means to point out the deficiencies that exist today and then attempt to address some strategies that I feel should improve the overall effectiveness of the program.”

“As I see it,” said Lewing, “mankind is ever more frequently cited as the cause of global degradation from climate change to clearcutting. In reality Mother Earth is such a force that when global disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and firestorms occur, all we can do is get out of the way and try to survive. But if mankind is also such a force of destruction, he can also be the force for reconstruction and improvement.”

The book is available at Valley Drug in Stevensville and at Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton. It is also available at the Bitterroot Public Library in Hamilton and the North Valley Public Library in Stevensville. Lewing said he hopes to get it into the libraries in Darby and Missoula soon. It is also available on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble in Missoula.