Fired up: Fires across the region highlight concern that agencies, NGOs not always good neighbors

Western Montana USFS fire

Twice in ten years, southwestern Montana ranchers Dennis and Mykal Kirkpatrick have watched their private property burn when fire traveled from federal land onto their own. They are concerned that the USFS is not always focused on extinguishing fires immediately.

The most recent incident, in May of 2025, burned about 115 acres of their deeded land which included grass, standing timber, 15 loads of poles and five-year old fence. The fire, which burned about 1,097 acres of U.S. Forest Service property and 819 acres of BLM came within about 250 yards of the Kirkpatricks’ home.

USFS public information officer Terina Hill with the USFS said her agency was alerted to this recent fire on May 1 and the cause of the fire remains under investigation.

Mykal said she and Dennis saw smoke Thursday when they were feeding. 

They assumed it was a prescribed burn on USFS, but they hadn’t been notified of one.

“We came in for lunch around two (on Thursday, May 1) and by then it was getting darn big. We called BLM to ask if they were conducting a prescribed burn, but they said they weren’t.” 

The Kirkpatricks then called the Wisdom USFS Ranger Station and were told “someone” was going to look into the source of the smoke. 

“By this time, it was bout 3:30 p.m. and it was getting pretty darn big by now. We get a lot of wind from the south,” said Mykal. “We did see a plane flying over the smoky area.”

That afternoon, the Kirkpatricks saw little if any USFS fire suppression efforts.

“That night we had a real heavy frost, so we thought, here is their chance, they can put it out now,” said Mykal.

But the following morning, the Kirkpatricks saw no sign of efforts to fight the fire. “We were still feeding cattle around 1:30 p.m.,” said Mykal. “By that time the frost had gone off, the wind had picked up and it was smoking pretty good. We can see planes from where we are feeding and around 1:30 or 2 p.m., a helicopter started dumping water. We thought ‘save your money. You aren’t going to get ahead of this if you don’t do something before the heat of the day.'”

Mykal said Saturday was similar – no evidence of firefighting until a helicopter showed up around 2:30 pm. 

Dennis said a dry cold front had been forecasted to hit the area Saturday, which was also expected to bring strong southerly wind gusts, which would push the fire toward the river and the Kirkpatricks’ home.

“All of the sudden, Saturday afternoon, the wind picked up from the south and that sucker went to moving toward our deeded property. We were horseback across the highway. We were going to head up on the west side where we keep our pairs and we were going kick pairs out of our calving pasture. It was getting big and getting kind of scary so we decided to jump the horses in the trailer to come back toward home to get a better picture of what was going on with the fire,” said Mykal.

When they got to the top of driveway, they could see that the fire was into their deeded property and had burned to the river, which they had hoped would serve as a boundary, but the strong winds gusted sparks across the river, igniting multiple spot fires throughout their yard and corrals. 

“At this point, there are sparks flying everywhere,” said Mykal. 

The ranger had called and left a voicemail for the Kirkpatricks saying they were sending law enforcement to “make sure everyone was safe.” After unsuccessful efforts to contact the ranger station reporting that the fire had jumped the river and was now threatening the Kirkpatricks’ home and outbuildings, a neighbor, who is a retired USFS fire management officer, made contact with local dispatch and ordered mutual aid from local volunteer fire departments. 

Lick tubs and buckets of water and help from passersby helped put out several spot fires in their horse corral and horse pasture, within about 250 feet of their home. 

Within about 30 minutes, fire trucks from the Wisdom and Wise River volunteer departments arrived and shortly after, a USFS fire rig arrived on scene. 

“There was a lot going on but there were enough people to get on top of it at that point,” Mykal said.

“What bothered me is when it was moving in our direction, to our deeded land, they didn’t seem to show any concern,” said Mykal. “Obviously they can do whatever they want on their ground, it was their monster, but we don’t understand why they didn’t have fire rigs in our yard to protect our structure when they saw it was headed our way,” she said. 

Mykal said after the fire was contained around the Kirkpatricks’ structures, two USFS fire engines did remain on watch throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, Dennis called the ranger station and spoke to the ranger. Shortly afterward, the USFS law enforcement showed up and took a statement from Dennis, and then the fire management officer arrived. “Everyone showed up,” said Dennis. “It was too little too late as far as protecting our property from the fire.”

Sunday morning Dennis and Mykal crossed the river horseback to assess damage on their private property. They discovered that the river was only as high as their horses’ knees, meaning that crossing the river with fire trucks or walking across would have been possible for firefighters. At that point, the Kirkpatricks showed the USFS fire truck drivers where to cross. 

“One USFS employee drove a pickup to the far bank and then said he couldn’t make it, and backed up. They were trying to say the river was too high, making it inaccessible for them to cross there and fight fire,” Mykal said.

The Kirkpatricks believe fire suppression would be more successful if the agencies would communicate with local ranchers and landowners. 

“Local ranchers would happily provide logistical support such as showing the USFS alternative routes to access fires, if only they would accept our help,” said Mykal. 

Dennis said it seems that when the USFS employees decide to access a fire, they can – no matter the surrounding topography. 

When they got across the river, the Kirkpatricks could see the USFS had  dropped smoke jumpers. The smoke jumpers succeeded at tending to hot spots, she said. “They were all over the place, they did a great job. They visited with us and asked us what our concerns were moving forward. They were all business and clearly wanted to put the fire out as quickly as possible,” she said. 

Sunday afternoon, rain rolled into the area. By Monday, rain and snow had extinguished the fire. 

Fire fighting strategy 

Mykal and Dennis are well aware that fire can be difficult if not impossible to stop in some situations but they believe the federal land management agencies, especially USFS could do better. 

Mykal said that they would appreciate compensation for their private property that was destroyed by the fire, but they also believe policy needs to change to require agencies to prioritize extinguishing fires before they grow out of control. 

Logging and grazing are common-sense strategies that can help keep fires, which are inevitable, from growing to an unmanageable size, she said.

The USFS ought to develop a strategy to extinguish each fire as quickly as possible, Kirkpatricks said. “It looks like fire has become a big business,” Mykal said. “They say they are getting ‘boots on the ground’ quickly, but they need to focus on attacking the fire, not just observing.”

Firefighting is a huge part of USFS budget, she said. “That expense could be cut or reduced if they agency would go after these fires with the same tenacity our local fire departments do,” she said.

Hill, speaking on behalf of the USFS, said that her agency fire management program focuses on safe, aggressive initial attack of fires with resources to suppress small fires before they become larger, complex incidents. 

One risk management tool the USFS utilizes is the Incident Strategic Alignment Process, she said. “FS fire managers strive to implement an informed risk-based strategy, anchored to the four pillars of the Incident Strategic Alignment Process (ISAP) – prioritized Critical Values at Risks (CVARs), strategy/strategic actions, risks to the responders, and the probability of success.”

Hill also told TSLN that “unfortunately the location of the fire was on the other side of the Big Hole River, which prevented any kind of access by vehicles because of the high water conditions.” She said the other option – a back access road was covered in snowdrifts.

“You can’t drive an engine across the river so we had to figure out how to get people to the fire,” she said. She said boats were used to take supplies across the river. 

“That’s where aircraft comes in handy,” she said.

2021 fire

Two fires – the Alder Creek Fire and the Christianson Creek Fire were burning near the Kickpatricks’ ranch in 2021. The USFS approached them and asked permission to use their private property, which had been logged and was therefore open, as a “catcher’s mitt” to direct the fires into, in an effort to extinguish them. 

The Kirkpatricks gave permission, and in the commotion, the USFS destroyed about 1,800 feet of new fence. The Kirkpatricks had submitted a claim to be reimbursed for that expense, but they received a claim denial by certified letter – on Monday, May 5, 2025, the day the rain helped contain the 2025 fire. 

Dennis explained that private landowners are responsible for all fence upkeep on fences between private and federal land. 

North Dakota Nature Conservancy Prescribed burn

Prescribed burns originating on a cluster of non privately-owned land in central North Dakota have twice in a decade been the cause of damage to private property. The Nature Conservancy owns land that borders US Fish and Wildlife Service land.

A recent fire not only encompassed neighboring private land, it destroyed a local fire department rig and put a volunteer firefighter in the hospital for weeks with serious burns.

Rachel Parson, who farms and ranches in the McClusky area with her family, was paged for a fire on April 12, 2025. The Nature Conservancy had not contacted her local fire department to warn them of a prescribed burn they planned to conduct that day, she said. Some pasture the Parson family rents burned in the fire. 

Parson said the Nature Conservancy lit the fire on its property. 

The high temperature for the day was around 69 degrees and the wind gusted up to 40 miles per hour with sustained winds of 10-15 mph in the morning and 20-25 mph in the afternoon, she said. Parson had not been notified of a burn planned for that day and he doesn’t know if other neighbors were notified. “It was not a day to burn in my opinion,” she said. 

The neighboring county had implemented a burn ban and the Sheridan County where the fire started was under an “if, then” burn ban, she said. “If conditions are low or moderate you can burn but if they are high or extreme, you can’t.”

“The day before we were under a red flag warning,” she explained. 

“I think it’s common sense that you don’t burn in that kind of weather.”

Parson said she doesn’t know if the Nature Conservancy had fire rigs on hand to extinguish the fire but she saw their staff lighting more fires even as the local volunteer departments were fighting them off. 

“The thing that really got me is we had seven departments down here trying to put them out and they continued to light more fires,” she said.

Another local rancher, Tom Hepper, also saw the Nature Conservancy continuing to light fires while the departments were battling the wind and flames. He was not warned of a planned burn.

“By the time there were firefighters out there, they were still starting fires, not even realizing it got away from them,” he said.

A gravel road served as a fire line, protecting Hepper’s land from the fire.

“It was windy when they started the fire and the forecast was for it to get windier. And it did. They didn’t have local fire departments on hand when they started it,” he said.

Hepper doesn’t know what the Nature Conservancy’s plan was for stopping the fire. He saw staff members on four-wheelers and side by sides with water on them.

“Local fire departments put it out at the expense of a truck and two firefighters getting burned pretty bad,” he said. One firefighter went to the Minnesota burn center and continued treatment there as of mid-May.

“They got into a bad situation and the truck quit. I’m assuming it ran out of oxygen.” 

Hepper would like to see the Nature Conservancy, US Fish and Wildlife Service and Ducks Unlimited, which also owns land in the area, allow more grazing and do less burning. “I’ve said to them, ‘why don’t you graze before you burn it? Then you don’t have to burn so much.’ It’s almost like a forest fire when they burn this because it’s got two to four years of growth on it and this area produces a lot of grass.”

“Anybody that’s in the agricultural business knows that grazing it is better than burning it. The neighboring land that is grazed looks better than the federal land.” 

Private fences were burned but no cattle or structures were destroyed, he said.

Nebraska Plum Creek fire

A rancher ignited a fire for a prescribed burn to manage cedar trees about four miles west of Johnstown, or 14 miles west of Ainsworth, Nebraska. 

About 7,025 acres were burned when assisting agencies were unable to contain the fire.

The Nebraska Game and Parks was assisting with the fire , said the Ainsworth Fire Chief Brad Fiala.

A “huge wind shift” that arrived earlier than forecasted blew the fire outside of containment lines. 

Fiala said the Johnstown fire department was on site to maintain control of the fire. The Ainsworth department was called after the fire blew out of control.

A couple of sheds were burned and around 43 head of pregnant cows died when the fire moved so quickly they weren’t able to be moved to safety.

A tanker with retardant and helicopters, along with 53 different local fire departments responded to eventually contain the fire. 

Because the fire was burning through cedar canyons which are heavily wooded, much of successful support came from the air, said Fiala.