Lost Horse Road logging: Wildfire defense or timber grab?
Laura Lundquist
DARBY (Missoula Current) - Some watchdogs are questioning roadside logging as a prevention for wildfire, but U.S. Forest Service managers say such work could limit fire spread while protecting firefighters.
As the 2026 wildfire season slowly wanes, Montana was once again better off than other Western states because few of its 11 larger fires on national forests expanded beyond a few thousand acres. But Darby Ranger Steve Brown didn't feel so lucky when he had to deal with three of those fires, the first being the North Fork Fire.
Brown said he didn’t know what to expect when the North Fork Fire was detected on July 24 high in the Bitterroot Mountains above the North Fork Lost Horse Creek west of Charlo Heights. At the beginning of the fire season, many were worried it could be a bad wildfire season because of Montana’s continuing drought and low winter snowpack. So that was kind of on Brown’s mind.
“Part of my master’s research, 25 years ago, was looking at what makes a severe fire season vs. a regular fire season. Everybody was always talking about snowpack, snowpack, snowpack. And that’s part of it. The other part is the rains you get in the spring. If you get good snowpack and moisture, it pushes the fire season back into August. But when fires start in July, that’s when they have time to get really big,” Brown said.
But the North Fork Fire didn’t get really big. Lightning had sparked a tree 8,000 feet up on the sparsely vegetated ridge that forms the boundary between the Bitterroot Selway Wilderness to the north and the non-wilderness that cherry-stems west into the wilderness along Lost Horse Creek. That terrain was problematic for fighting fire.
In the past, the Forest Service might have held off a day or more to see what the fire did. In such remote rocky terrain, it might not do much. But the Trump administration has reinstated a full suppression strategy for wildfires, much like the “10 a.m policy” of old when every new fire had to be put out by 10 a.m. That puts managers such as Brown in a bad spot if they value firefighter safety.
Brown referenced several digital maps on WildFireSA, a National Interagency Fire Center application that has been developed to aid fire professionals with decision-making. The map layers use color gradation across the landscape to show modeling results of ground evacuation times for firefighters, snag hazard risk, fire suppression difficulty, and best locations for fire control lines and points. The maps are modeled using variables such as steepness, vegetation types and distance from roads.
Not surprisingly, the maps showed the North Fork Fire location had a high suppression difficulty and a long evacuation time - longer than 6 hours - should a firefighter be injured. So it wouldn’t be wise to send firefighters in. The snag hazard was also high, which meant dead trees were more likely to topple.
For the next few days, the Forest Service doused the fire with helicopter water bucket drops as the fire smoldered in the high country, expanding to 105 acres over three days. But Brown noticed more trees were rolling down the hill, perhaps pushed by the water drops and helicopter downdraft. The fire did little after that, burning 10 more acres in a short run to the east on July 31.
“At the start of the fire, we hit it with bucket drops. But in steep country, water can wash burning embers downhill. There was a conversation that we might be making it worse. (We thought) if we just leave it alone, it might just hit these rocks (to the south) and rock itself out,” Brown said. “We’d fly up there and think, ‘What is it burning?’ Must have been burning moss or something. (I thought) I can’t believe this thing still has anywhere to go. That said, there still was a chance that, with a good wind, it might spot over (to the forested areas.)”
After Aug. 8, the North Fork Fire didn’t expand beyond 118 acres. But the Forest Service ended up putting 166 workers in the area by Aug. 10, mainly to log and chip around fire lines being built along Lost Horse and Hayes Creek roads, which were closed starting July 29.
Along the creeks, the digital maps showed streaks of blue, showing they had the best probability of fire suppression, and blue to green showing they were the best places to set up fire lines. So that’s why Brown said he decided to turn the roads south and east of the fire into fuel breaks. On Lost Horse Road, which follows Lost Horse Creek, they cleared a swath 60 to 100 feet wide for about 7 miles, starting about a mile east of the confluence of Lost Horse and North Fork Lost Horse creeks.
“It was 60-70% agency people and the rest were contractors. We were done with everything by Sept. 1,” Brown said. “Based upon our modeling, the fire was either going to come out the North Lost Horse drainage or come down and up over the ridge to Lost Horse. So we put in our fuel break there to give us a hard control line on the road. As we burned off that, we’d have less chance of (the fire) crowning and spotting across the creek and getting south. Once it gets across the creek, there’s no good place to catch the fire if it got going south. Como is where we’d be catching it.”
Much of the forest to the east between the North Fork Fire and structures in the Bitterroot Valley has already burned in previous fires, including the Observation Point and the Roaring Lion fires in 2016.
Some in the Bitterroot Valley, including Friends of The Bitterroot, have questioned the need to do so much clearing along Lost Horse Road for a wildfire that never went anywhere. Jeff Lonn of the Friends of the Bitterroot published an article in The Wildlife News that took Brown to task for the fuel breaks. Lonn said the wildfire work removed old-growth logs, logged into the Resource Natural Area at the eastern end of Lost Horse Road, and cleared some areas to a width of 400 feet.
“Lost Horse Road is the only road into the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains, and its surroundings are (or were) reminiscent of a national park. It is highly valued for both its mountain views and for its passage through a shady, old growth forest. (The Bitterroot National Forest) has long tried to log here but was never successful due to fierce public opposition and (the National Environmental Policy Act). Most recently, BNF tried to get the Lost Horse Road included in the (wildland-urban interface) to make it easier to justify logging there, but not even the pro-logging county commission allowed that. Now, by declaring a fake emergency, BNF was finally able to get some of those logs,” Lonn wrote in the article.
In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production” that calls for a 25% expansion of timber production on national forests. Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins followed that a month later with a secretarial memo empowering the U.S. Forest Service to expedite work on the ground and carry out authorized emergency actions related to wildfire risk. Those and a number of subsequent orders that have favored the timber industry, including the imminent repeal of the Roadless Rule, can lead some to be suspicious about the true intent behind some Forest Service actions.
Brown said if his goal was just to log timber, he could have logged all the way up Lost Horse Road instead of stopping about halfway. He added that they did treat the Resource Natural Area differently. Instead of completely denuding the area like they do with a fuel break, they created a “shaded fuel break” where they leave a few trees that are far enough apart that they don’t perpetuate a crown fire. That was based upon the recommendation of the Bitterroot Forest Resource Natural Area coordinator, Brown said.
“It was nothing about a timber grab. You look at the volume that came off, it seems like a lot - 400,000 board feet or something. But that’s less than 10% of a typical timber sale,” Brown said. “The big, old trees they mention - those were blown down by the windstorm last December. A lot of tipped-over root wads. In these fuel breaks, these big trees are the ones we’d want to leave, for the reason (Lonn) says. They’d probably survive multiple fires, they’re going to survive a low-intensity ground fire that we’d put through there, and they’re going to be the ones we want to repopulate the site. These ones were on the ground.”
Brown agreed that there was one section where the contractors cleared a wider space due to miscommunication. Since it’s about 5 miles up Lost Horse Road, the contractors cleared a staging area for logs waiting for logging trucks to arrive. Brown said he told them to stop because large log decks would increase the wildfire danger.
“It was a mistake; it was not part of the original plan,” Brown said.
About a month after the North Fork Fire started, Brown had to deal with the Nature Grove and Black Bear fires deep in the Sapphire Range near Skalkaho Creek and the Sapphire Wilderness Study Area. Those fires grew to 1422 and 2126 acres, respectively.
Once again, the leading edges of the fires were far enough in the mountains that the WildFireSA maps showed the fires had high suppression difficulty and long ground evacuation times in case of injured firefighters. So again, Brown ordered water drops instead of inserting firefighters.
“Our approach was full suppression. But not all fires are in places that you can just put people in. Nature Grove was that way,” Brown said. “A number of years ago, I came in to help on a fire. It was in a remote place and they were being really aggressive in dangerous terrain. I was really uncomfortable - somebody was going to get hurt. And sure enough, a tree got dropped on a hotshot. There was very little in terms of values at risk, and I told myself right then and there I was never going to ask somebody to do something dangerous unless there was a damn good reason.”
For the Nature Grove Fire, the Skalkaho Rye Road 75 and Forest Service Roads 711 and 720 were closed. Because Road 720 runs south of the Nature Grove Fire, Brown turned it into another fuel break. But since the Nature Grove Fire started later in August, it stalled due to the early September rains so the fuel break wasn’t needed. Similar fuel breaks were cut along Forest Service roads near the Moose Fire on the Beaverhead Deerlodge National Forest that weren’t ultimately needed.
The thing is the WildFireSA maps will almost always show that roads and the creeks they often follow have lower suppression difficulty so they make the best control lines and provide the best evacuation times. So, when they log such roads into fuel breaks, managers like Brown could face opposition when the public sees the resulting damage. Brown said that might not happen if the public understands why managers make those decisions.
“It demonstrates a need for us to better explain the why of what we do. Where is the best place to engage these fires where we’re balancing the risk to firefighters with risk to the values we want to protect?” Brown said. “Looking back, we probably could have done this different, we could have done that different. But at the time, you make the best decision you can with the information you have. Looking back on it, we probably could have done nothing with the North Fork. Not even drop water on it at the beginning.”
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.