National park icons threatened by wind-frenzied wildfires
HELENA, Mont. — Winds wreaked havoc on wildfires that were threatening two crown jewels of the National Park Service on Monday, pushing the flames toward manmade and natural icons in and around Glacier and Yosemite national parks.
The wind-driven fires, combined with high temperatures and dry conditions, have disrupted holiday travel and hampered firefighters across the West during a Labor Day weekend that capped a devastating summer in which an area larger than Rhode Island has burned.
The dozens of fires burning across the West and Canada have blanketed the air with choking smoke from Oregon, where ash fell on the town of Cascade Locks, to Colorado, where health officials issued an air quality advisory alert.
A fire in Montana’s Glacier National Park emptied the park’s busiest tourist spot as wind gusts drove the blaze toward the doorstep of a century old lodge. The 14-square-mile (36-squarekilometers) fire that consumed a historic Glacier backcountry chalet last week was about a mile away from Lake McDonald Lodge, a 103-year-old Swiss chaletstyle hotel.
The lodge’s setting on the lake as the Going-tothe-Sun-Road begins its vertigo-inducing climb up the Continental Divide has made it an endearing park symbol for many visitors, and it’s the jumping-off point for hikes, boat rides, horseback riding and tours in old-fashioned buses known as jammers.
Rangers evacuated tourists and residents from 55 homes near the lake on Sunday as firefighters laid hoses and sprinklers around the hotel. On Monday, fire crews got bad news: The wind had shifted and gusts were driving the fire down the mountainside toward the lake’s shores.
Losing Lake McDonald Lodge on top of the destruction of Sperry Chalet last week would be “unimaginably devastating,” said Mark Hufstetler, a historian who worked at the lodge for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
“These are some of the most remarkable buildings anywhere in the United States and they are an integral part of the Glacier experience and the Glacier tradition,” Hufstetler said. “If they did not exist, that experience and that tradition would not exist, either.”