1910 Fire

A King Sized Burn

The Great Fire of 1910 or the Big Burn, was a wildfire in the Interior Northwest that burned more than 3 million acres in North Idaho and Montana with some extensions into Washington and Canada during the late summer of the 1910. An estimation of land burned is equivalent to the size of the state of Connecticut.

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The fires were sparked by lighting and wind and spread quickly through the Bitterroot and Lolo mountain ranges destroying towns and taking more than 80 lives. It was the largest and deadliest forest fire in U.S history.

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The U.S Forest Service received recognition which included an increase in budget to help with suppression. The fire was so big and significant that many Firefighters received national recognition. The Big Burn was a significant turning point for the development of wildfire suppression and put Idaho on the map as a training point for forest fire fighting, specifically with smoke jumping, which is when fire fighters jump out of a plane at the site of a fire to help fight directly from the source.

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 The efforts in fighting and the damages by the fire raised awareness to national natural conservation and the importance of land preservation and created concepts of natural areas.

White Pine have more hydrocarbon than any other pine. The sap inside the trees boiled and exploded. The combustion was so strong that it was categorized has hurricane sized winds. Part of the reason so much land in the Interior Northwest was lost and destroyed was because of the burning point of the White Pine and the winds