Rolling Dog Farm Blog

Last night we had the biggest scare we’ve ever experienced since moving here in 2000.  About 9:30 p.m. Alayne was over at Widget’s House putting dogs up when she saw a bolt of lightning strike the ground to the south of us, across the county road; in an instant a raging grass fire erupted.  I was in Birdie’s Cottage, one of our smaller dog cottages, when she reached me on the intercom.  "Fire on the flat!", she yelled.  "Call 911!" 

I ran outside and immediately saw a hideous sight in the distance — a mass of flames.  It was hard to tell how close the fire really was to our property, but as you can see from the photo, it looked far too close!  The wind was coming from the south, the direction the storm had come from, and so we were right in the path.  (The trees you see just to the left of center in the photo are cottonwoods on our property.  It looks like they’re engulfed in flames but they weren’t.)

I called 911, which routes the calls to the Sheriff’s Department in Deer Lodge, our county seat, 80 miles away.  Next I called one of our friends, Tim Jacobsen, who is a member of the Ovando Volunteer Fire Department. 

We had two blind horses out in a pasture still, so Mariah and I headed out in the darkness to go get them while Alayne continued to call our nearest neighbors to alert them.

With so many animals (including 24 blind horses), there’s no way we can evacuate suddenly.  Our plan for a grass fire — we worry a lot about this every summer — is to pull all the horses into the corrals and barns, and then defend those structures with hoses and fire lines.  The ground around the corrals and barns is relatively free of combustible material, so we think we would have a reasonable chance of keeping a grass fire at bay. 

But seeing a grass fire erupt this close was truly frightening.  We laid out the hoses by the barns and then waited to see what the wind would do.  Just five minutes or so after the fire erupted, the wind died.  Whew.  "What a relief!", we thought.  But it was only temporary.

We could see Tim and the other fire department volunteers begin arriving on the scene.  Thank God for these folks, I kept thinking.  Then the wind came up again, this time from the east, pushing the flames westward now.  That’s when Tim called Deer Lodge to ask for reinforcements.  Two more times the wind shifted abruptly, forcing the fire department volunteers to regroup.  As the minutes ticked by, more and more vehicles arrived, including from the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.  Tim said he estimated that at some points the fire was moving at 25 miles per hour, with the flames six feet high.  (Grass fires are notorious for being fast-moving.)

We watched all this from the loft in Lena’s Barn, where I took the photo.  It gave us the best vantage point to keep an eye on the fire.  By the time I took the photo, the wind had reversed course again, now coming from the west, so the fire was being driven back to the east.

Finally a brief rain squall blew in from the northwest, helping dampen the flames.  By 1:30 a.m. the fire was largely out and most of the crews had departed. 

In the morning light we could see that the fire was farther from us than it looked last night … about a mile and a half away.  Still, too close for comfort!  Had the south wind continued, we would have been in serious trouble.

We are just very grateful to all of the amazing folks who turned out to battle this fire — thank you!

(Click on photo for larger image.)