Wildfires Chase Montana Tourists

Several thousand people streamed out of Glacier National Park on Thursday after a wildfire burned into the western half of the park and officials worried that conditions were ripe for more fires to break out.

Wildfires have prompted officials to close most of the western half of Glacier - widely considered one of the crown jewels of the national park system. The park covers more than 1 million acres in northwest Montana near the Canadian border and is home to some of the most spectacular mountain views in the country.

"The purpose of the evacuation is to make sure the fire doesn't get behind people and they don't have a way to get out of the park," park information officer Punky Moore said.

Park spokeswoman Amy Vanderbilt said several thousand people were evacuated, including concession employees, landowners, campers and lodge guests.

Park officials also ordered the evacuation of a valley on the eastern edge of the park because of "red flag" fire warnings stemming from dry conditions, high wind and low humidity.

Officials said two fires posed the biggest threat, including one that swelled to at least 6,000 acres by Thursday morning and a second estimated at nearly 2,200 acres, officials said. The smaller blaze prompted Thursday's evacuations in the park's western half.

According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there are currently 46 major fires burning across 379,764 acres in the United States.

Montana, with nine fires, reports the most. New Mexico has six, Colorado and Idaho each have five, and California and Utah both have four. Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming also have major fires burning.

In Idaho, residents mourned the deaths of Jeff Allen, 24, and Shane Heath, 22, who were overrun by flames after they had rappelled to the ground to fight a blaze in the Salmon-Challis National Forest.

The fire, about 130 miles south of Missoula, was caused by lightning and first reported Sunday. Hot temperatures and wind blew it up from 120 acres to about 1,000 acres, officials said.

"The dryness of the trees and other shrubs, the high temperatures of over 100 degrees for weeks, the relative humidity down to around 16 percent - all those factors contribute to very extreme fire behavior," U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Erin O'Connor said.

Allen and Heath were the eighth and ninth firefighters assigned to wildfires to die since February nationwide, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Only one of the previous deaths was by fire, while the others were helicopter crashes and accidents.

Another Idaho blaze grew to 14,000 acres in the Boise National Forest and was about eight miles away from the small town of Atlanta on Thursday. Isolated summer cabins were evacuated, and up to 80 residences are considered threatened.

In far northern Washington state, Gov. Gary Locke flew over a 58,734-acre wildfire, the largest of three in the state.

"It was just an incredible sight," Locke said. "The smoke column was higher than our plane and there were dozens and dozens of fires."

Officials from the British Columbia Forest Service met with U.S. officials Thursday since the blaze is just a few miles from the border. It threatens British Columbia's Cathedral Provincial Park and Snowy Provincial Park.

In Wyoming, firefighters dug in for a sixth straight day in hopes of slowing down a wildfire that threatened dozens of seasonal homes in the Big Horn Mountains of north-central part of the state.

A 122,000-acre cluster of fires in eastern Montana is the biggest in the state, but officials say they are close to containing the fires in that area.

So far, the 2003 fire season has been relatively mild compared to the past ten years. Only 33,000 fires have been reported to date, far below the 50,000-fire average, while just over 1.5 million acres have burned. Since 1993, an average 2 million had burned by this point.