HELENA — If you spotted some smoke to Helena's north, chances are it's from a prescribed burn in the American Bar area near Gates of the Mountain. U.S. Forest Service plans to tackle about 260 acres.
“We have a lot of prescribed burning planned this fall. And so, expect to see smoke on nice days,” says Michael Kaiser, Fire Management Officer for the Helena Ranger District.
These 260 acres are building upon the Middleman Project that's working to treat about 50,000 acres.
Kaiser tells us this burn is right at the beginning of the prescribed burning season. Typically prescribed burns are planned for the fall and spring, and pile burning goes on during winter.
“It’s highly weather dependent. We'll probably keep burning as long as the weather stays pretty nice. Once we start getting more rain and snow, we'll probably transition to some pile burning,” says Kaiser.
In the coming months, Kaiser and his team will finish up about 1,000 acres of pile burning which will wrap things up in the Tenmile - South Helena Project.
If the weather holds up, the forest service crew will burn around 275 acres in the Spruce Hills area up towards Park Lake later this week.
While the original plan was to burn another 200 acres southwest of Helena at Wakina Sky later this week, Kaiser worries that the weather won't cooperate. The Forest Service weighs factors such as wind and moisture before going forward with a burn.
“What people would call really nice fall days are kind of the days that we're looking for to burn,” says Kaiser.
Kaiser says they work closely with the Montana DEQ and the Montana Idaho Airshed Group to determine if the smoke will rest in the valley or disperse.
“So, if we have good dispersion and that we're not going to get that smoke settling into the valleys, you know, those are the days that we're going to be burning," says Kaiser.
Many of these same Forest Service members who do prescribed burns are the same people who fight wildfires in the summer. The work they do now will impact what work they do during wildfire season.
“We want to hit those conditions so that we get the fuels reduced and out of the units so that when a wildfire such as Horse Gulch happens, we have these units treated. And much like Horse Gulch, we were able to use treatment units to help control that fire,” says Kaiser.
