A fire burns today where one once raged

The Boise National Forest got its wake up call on fires 20 years ago this month. Sebastian Junger captured in his book "Fire" the drama of that July 26, 1989, lightning storm that touched off the Lowman Fire that blackened 47,000 acres and burned up much of the tiny forest hamlet including the well-known Haven Lodge. "The fire created its own convection winds, making the fire burn hotter and hotter until the fire behavior spiraled completely out of control," Junger wrote. "Temperatures at the heart of the blaze reached 2,000 degrees. A column of smoke and ash rose right miles up into the atmosphere. Trees were snapped in half by the force of the convection winds." The scene Junger described has become all to familiar for those of us living in the West. I had seen it the year before in Yellowstone, the signal fire of the coming age of global warming. But the Lowman fire was different than Yellowstone. The trees were thick-barked ponderosa pines, which had evolved to survive all but an inferno like the 1989 blaze. Yellowstone's lodgepole pines lived at a higher elevation and only became vulnerable when the summers were dry, hot and windy. But Lowman's trees expected fires every seven to 30 years. What Junger didn't report was that from 1960 to 1989 the Forest Service had put out 70 fires in the Lowman area with its crack teams of smoke jumpers, hotshots, and helitack crews, its retardant bombers and network of roads...IdahoStatesman