Mann Gulch fire

The Mann Gulch fire was a wildfire started on August 5, 1949, in the Gates of the Mountain Wild Area, now named the Gates of the Mountains Wilderness, in Helena National Forest, in western Montana. A team of 15 smokejumpers parachuted in that afternoon. They were headed downhill to the river as a safe refuge because of increasing fire activity on the opposite, north-facing slope, but could not see that the fire had spotted in front of them and had cut off their escape route, forcing them to turn back, uphill. The fire, meanwhile, began advancing on them rapidly, driven by up-gulch winds, and accelerated by the dry grass on the south-facing slope. Wind, slope, and fine fuel caused the fire to advance faster than they could retreat. 12 smokejumpers and a ground-based firefighter were fatally burned. Two escaped unharmed by running up the fall line to a rock ridge where they found a crack through which they escaped. The foreman, Wagner Dodge, survived not by outrunning the fire, but by lighting an emergency backfire now known as an escape fire and jumping into the burned area, lying face down in the black while the main fire joined and passed around his flame front. He had ordered his men to follow but they refused and ran.

The United States Forest Service drew lessons from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire by designing new training techniques and safety measures that developed how the agency approached wildfire suppression and emergency management. The agency also increased emphasis on fire research and the science of fire behavior.

University of Chicago English professor and author Norman Maclean (1902–1990) researched the fire and its behavior for his posthumously published book Young Men and Fire (1992). Maclean, who had worked in northwestern Montana logging camps and for the Forest Service in his youth, recounted the events of the fire and ensuing tragedy and undertook an investigation of the fire's causes. Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1992. The 1952 film Red Skies of Montana, starring actor Richard Widmark and directed by Joseph M. Newman, was loosely based on the events of the Mann Gulch fire.

The location of the Mann Gulch fire was added as a historical district to the United States National Register of Historic Places on May 19, 1999. A sign is placed near Mann Gulch to memorialize the tragedy, and can be seen from the waters of the nearby Missouri River.