pitch black plains

Searching for the Milford Flat Fire

By Christian Probasco, 7-15-07

	ABOVE: North of Cove Fort, the aftermath of the Milford Flat Fire. MIDDLE: Near Hodges' Store. BELOW: West Parking Lot near Cove Fort. Photos by Christian Probasco.

The Milford Flat Fire was the largest in Utah’s history.  Last Wednesday afternoon, after my wife Sarah came home from work to take care of our baby, I filled up my in-laws’ Suburban and took a drive south from Fountain Green to get a firsthand view of it, or at least the damage it left in its wake.

First stop: Kanosh, the staging area.  The park was filled with firefighters’ tents.  I checked in at the information yurt and met incident management information officer Vince Mazzier.  He told me that the fire had burned over 330,000 acres and was 30% contained. The current hot spots were in the extreme north and south, and the south end, near Beaver, was “burning into itself” as it ran up into the mountains.  There were over 400 firefighters involved.  There were cumulus clouds over the site.  I asked Mazzier how the weather would affect the operation. He didn’t expect much rain but believed that the “outflow from the thunder cell,” could make the situation worse.  I further enquired where I could get some pictures of the fire without getting fried.  “How ‘bout up here?” I asked him, pointing west of Highway I-15 on the big map of central Utah hanging on the wall, “Look at all those dirt roads heading out in the desert.”

“Closed,” he told me, “You can’t go out there without an escort.”

So I headed south amid fire truck traffic and Forest Service vehicles and it wasn’t long before I came across evidence of the fire in the form of a grass plain burnt pitch black as far west as the eye could see.  The fire had crossed the highway here, but hadn’t made it far. 

Further on the highway wound up through the foothills of the Tushar Mountains and the grass gave way to pinion and juniper.  There were snags from a previous fire—maybe last years’-- and then there were the remains of this years’ burn; swaths of carbonized trees. The undergrowth was reduced to gray ash.  Kicked up by the increasingly strong winds, it was difficult to differentiate from smoke.  The smell was heavenly. There were fire teams along the road putting out spot fires.

What set the Milford Flat Fire apart from the other blazes burning in Utah, beyond its record-setting size, was its exponential rate of growth.  Sometime on Friday afternoon, lightning ignited a small brush fire northeast of the hamlet of Milford.  By Saturday morning the fire covered 2000 acres. By the evening of that day, it had grown to 160,000 acres. By the next morning it had grown to nearly 300,000 acres.  Then it slowed down because the winds which were driving it abated.  Now, over a week later, the fire has burned 360,000 acres and is about done. 

On the other side of the foothills is Cove Fort, the largest settlement endangered by the flames.  Just off the highway, in what had been a cedar forest, the advertisements had been burned off a steel billboard 60 feet high.  Down the road, a convenience store in the middle of the burn had escaped without much damage and was open for business.  In the parking lot to the west, below the ridge from which the fire approached, a late-model Ford pickup was melted into the asphalt. Closer to the store, the front of an old cabin had been scorched.  I found the store’s owners, the Hodges family, in the untouched tire shop nearby.

“We were evacuated on Friday,” Marlene Hodges told me, “and then let back in on Saturday.  Then, about 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon, that’s when thick smoke stared coming through. You could see flashes of orange in it.”

Marlene was minding the store with her two sons, Casey and Shay. A cousin of hers was wetting down the building’s wood siding with a hose.

“There were 3 trucks with BLM line workers in them on the west parking lot,” said Shay, a teenager, “We thought they would fight the fire but the wind kicked so son-of-a-bitching hard that they took off.”

“How fast do you think the fire was moving?” I asked him.

“The wind was blowing about 40 or 50 miles per hour,” he said.

“We got out in about 2 minutes,” said Marlene, “There was a truck filling up at one of the pumps.  A lady at the counter asked me if I could finish the sandwich I was making for her.  I told her, ‘we have to run!’”

“So the fire just burned around the store?” I asked.

“It burned over the store,” said Marlene’s husband, Jimmy, and then he described the security video which showed firebrands shooting through the empty fuel bays. He invited me on a tour of the premises.

“What religion are you?” he asked as we set off, “Because you’re about to see a miracle.”

In fact, the way the fire behaved did seem miraculous, or at least, to a heathen like me, highly suspicious.  Down the hill from the convenience store was an RV park for the Latter-Day-Saints who give tours of Cove Fort, about a mile distant.  The fire had burned along a fence line which delineated the property.  The two dozen or so berths for trailers and campers, surrounded by burnt grassland and forest, appeared to have been left completely untouched.  A propane tank on the side of a torched hill also appeared unmolested.  And the wood-sided laundry house nearby was untouched, though the flames came within ten feet of it.

Jimmy also showed me where the fire had come up onto the rise near the west parking lot.  It had burnt the grass on the edge but left another propane tank unharmed, and had then jumped about 500 feet and landed beneath a trailer converter dolly not far from a stack of tires by the tire shop and then burnt along another fenceline between the store and the RV park, igniting and exploding another propane tank and the shed it was in, but not the mobile home next to it, and then fanning outward to join up with the rest of the fire.

“See that hill?” he asked, pointing to a ridge far downwind, beyond a green alfalfa field that was being watered during the fire, “That’s where they started fighting the fire again.  A helicopter dropped retardant there.”

And as for the pickup in the west lot, he told me, “There was a horse trailer attached to it that belonged to someone else.  The trailer didn’t have so much as a spot of soot on it.”

“So do you think the pickup owner was more of a sinner—or maybe the guy who owned the trailer was more angelic?” I asked.

Jimmy just shook his head. 

Before leaving, I had a few words with firefighter Kelly Melott, down from the Neola fire in northern Utah, waiting in her truck while her companion bought provisions in the store.  I asked her where I should go to get some good shots of the fire.  She told me I wouldn’t see much in this neighborhood.  The interior was burnt out, with the exception of a few hot spots.  The smoky edges of the fire, however, were being “wind-tested” by the storm.  I gathered that if the perimeter where the fire had most recently burned itself out erupted into flames again and consumed the side of the mountain, the blaze would have failed the test.

Next stop: the fort.  The Mormon pioneers built it in the late 1800s.  The idea then was, you wanted to have towns one day’s riding distance from each other all down the length of Utah so you didn’t have to set up camp under the stars and maybe get ambushed by Indians.  There was no water for a town at Cove Fort so the Mormons built a defendable stagecoach stop there instead. Other Utah forts, constructed of wood or adobe are either in sad shape or not there at all.  Cove Fort’s 100 foot long, 18 foot thick walls were constructed of volcanic rock.  It looks like it was erected last week.  A certain Sister Houston showed me where the fire had skirted the hill hit by the retardant and scorched an entire field and then come within a hundred feet of a huge wood barn on the edge of the site. 

“Last years’ fires came within about a half-mile of here,” she said.

“Last years’?”

Sister Houston pointed beyond the blackened field to the high grassy foothills north of the fort.  They were grassy because those fires had burned all the vegetation off them last year.  One of the fires had been caused by lightning and the other probably by a careless motorist tossing a cigarette out his window.  That last one turned particularly dangerous.  She told me of a rancher who had to gun his pickup at eighty miles an hour to escape the fireball chasing him up the canyon. 

Sister Houston asked me if I’d heard anything about another blaze—the Greenville Bench Fire--threatening Beaver from the south, which may have joined up with the Milford Flat Fire.  But I didn’t know anything about it.  There were big fires all over the state and it was hard to keep track of them. 

As I headed back to I-15, rain drops hit my windshield.  The sky was overcast.  I knew I wasn’t going to see so much as a column of smoke.  Still, there was a tall range of volcanic hills with all the vegetation burnt off them, and near Sulphurdale, a finger of burnt earth extending out to the highway. 

I had to turn back at Beaver.  I stopped in at a convenience store briefly for coffee and asked about the fires.  The woman at the desk pointed, “One’s ten miles that way (northwest) and the other is three miles that way (southwest).” And then she began helping another customer.

Heading north on I-15, I ran into more light rain.  A skycrane helicopter drifted over the highway and landed at the heliport near Kanosh, about a quarter-mile from where the fire had crossed the highway.  I turned west on a dirt road into the desert plain Vince Mazzier had warned me to stay away from.  I didn’t encounter any fire crews or roadblocks.  A few miles out the landscape turned black.  The hills to the south looked like burnt crust.  All the fenceposts had been charred and the barbed wire had snapped and curled back into loops.  What patches of grass remained felt to me like brittle plastic. 

Coincidentally, wildfires were the subject of the radio program I was listening to while I was driving.  The host and his guest were discussing the possibility of a climate shift in the West, as a separate phenomenon, I suppose, from global warming, and an increase in the number of record-sized fires over the next several years.  I prefer to wait and observe for about twenty years before I make up my mind on which way the climate is headed, but from where I was traveling, at that time, the prediction didn’t seem like much of a stretch.

I was struck by the difference between the Milford Flat Fire and the recent, devastating Angora Fire, which ate up a bunch of expensive homes near Lake Tahoe, when I came across a line shack less than a quarter mile from the edge of the burn.  The dilapidated cabin was so old the logs had turned gray.  Next to it was an equally old corral and a creaking Aermotor windmill pumping water into a tank.  In terms of monetary value, that line camp was nothing compared to even a garage near Lake Tahoe, but its destruction would be tragic to the cowboy who relied on it to water his cattle.  As it is, the fire has left a lot of ranchers without a winter range.

Heading west, I began encountering more intact yellow patches of cheat grass.  And then there was no more burnt earth.  I got onto Highway 257 as the sun set and drove north as fast as the Suburban would go.  It was fifteen minutes before I saw another car coming the other way.  There is a great expanse of what some people would consider nothing between where the fire was supposedly still burning and the city of Delta, and then another even more desolate expanse north of Delta, almost to the state line.

Catching Highway 6 east to Lynndyl and then 132 back towards Nephi and Fountain Green, I could feel the temperature rising as the thunder cell moved north.  The air became drier, too. Five times I passed over what Utahans call a “river.” This one was the Sevier River, which drains much of the high plateaus of central Utah.  At the points I crossed it, where I could see it, the Sevier was just a few muddy puddles.  Once again, central Utah seemed ripe for a major fire. 

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