After 43 years as a firefighter's eye in the sky, Jim Haslip knows fire. People who know Haslip say that when looking for wildfires from his perch in a four-seater spotter plane, he can tell at a glance which "smoke" -- a hazy column that often indicates a fire -- can be caught and which one is going to run.

Haslip spotted this year's Snowbank Fire and is convinced it never should have grown beyond a quarter-acre near Copper Creek. That blaze, which merged with the Talon Fire to become the Snow/Talon, eventually consumed more than 37,700 acres.

In addition, there are questions as to whether the Moose Fire, which at one point threatened the towns of Helmville and Lincoln, would have done so if the initial attack upon it was made the evening it was spotted, instead of waiting until the next day. The Moose Fire, which connected with the Wasson Fire and other small blazes to become the Moose/Wasson blaze, burned 1,945 acres.

And after spending $16.5 million on the two fires -- known as the Lincoln Complex -- only the Moose/Wasson was extinguished by human efforts. Firefighters worked mainly on the south side of the Snow/Talon blazes, eventually herding them into the Scapegoat Wilderness Area and waiting for snow to smother the flames in what is called "the least cost alternative."

"That fire (Snowbank) shouldn't have gotten away," says Haslip, a retired Helena High School teacher, who holds a master's degree in earth sciences. "It wasn't that big, it was right by the road and there was a water source right there for a (helicopter) dip site. ... I've seen literally thousands of fires, so I have a pretty good idea of what can be put out.

"That fire should have been out and called out within a day or two."

Not everyone shares Haslip's assessment.

"I guess any fire is stoppable if you have enough stuff," said Bret Ruby, fire management officer for the Helena National Forest. "Given what I saw up there n I've been doing this for a long time and am a fire behavior analyst n the only thing I think would have made a difference on those fires is if I could have got a sky crane (helicopter) with 2,000-3,000 gallons and a five minute turnaround time or less.

"The first day (on Snow/Talon) I thought we could have stopped it. But after the smokejumpers got chased off, I knew it was gone."

The system falters

In numerous interviews, no one pointed a finger for the escaped fires at a lack of efforts on the ground by initial attack crews, who were tending to as many as five fires at one time. Instead, many talked about inefficient or inexperienced dispatching, which they say led to critical time lapses in getting helicopters for initial attack.

For example, although Haslip called for helicopters immediately after spotting what eventually became the Snowbank and Moose fires, that didn't happen for hours. In addition, somewhere along the chain of command in the dispatch center in Missoula, an offer to provide initial attack on the Snowbank Fire from a state helicopter with a 250-gallon water bucket was refused, even though the helicopter just might have been able to squelch the blaze within the first few hours.

Other problems also plagued firefighting efforts. Equipment malfunctioned; working next to a stream home to an endangered trout species at times hampered the use of heavy equipment; and Lincoln's remote location made it difficult to get what limited crews and resources that were available on scene in a timely manner.

And Ruby explains that with all the other fires going on throughout the country at that time, once the Lincoln fires started to run, they ranked low on the national priority list.

"The day that Snowbank started, that evening I ended up talking quite a lot with our dispatch center and with contacts with the multi-agency coordinating group, who are the ones who allocate resources," Ruby said. "I was trying to get one of those snorkel cranes, but the answer that we got was that all of the aircraft were unavailable. They were all involved in structure protection elsewhere."

But Haslip's 35 years as an air attack supervisor forces him to focus on those first few hours. Even months after the fires, he still can't shake his anger when he thinks back to the start of the Snowbank Fire.

"I know it's easy to second guess, but this is not a matter of second guessing," Haslip said. "It's a matter of doing it right in the first place."

The Moose begins

This stands out as a record-setting year for wildfires in the West. By mid-August, more than 150,000 acres were on fire in Montana alone, in at least 20 separate major blazes. Fire behavior was extreme, as the West struggled through its fourth year of drought. It wasn't unusual for dry lightning storms to ignite dozens of new fires every day, with crews having a statewide suppression rate of around 99 percent.

On Aug. 12, as temperatures hovered in the low 90s, crews from the Helena National Forest and State Department of Natural Resources and Conservation worked on extinguishing at least three small "starts," when a new thunderstorm passed through the Lincoln valley, showering it with dry lightning, hail and a trace of rain.

In the Lincoln dispatch center, Enie Fisher requested that Haslip and pilot Doug Powell fly their Cessna, known by its tail letters as Six-Seven Mike, to check out a report of smoke over the Lincoln Valley.

At 7:44 p.m., Haslip reported a single tree burning between Moose and Little Moose creeks. It was on a rocky mountainside that was difficult to reach by ground, so he requested a helicopter drop a bucket or two of water to put it out, or at least hold it overnight until crews could get to the tree in the morning.

Fisher called Helena to see about getting a helicopter dispatched.

"But because of the hour, and their time already was limited, by the time they got up and got back they would have been over their allowed time" to fly, Fisher recalled.

Visibility was quite poor, anyway, and within half an hour, hail was falling and lightning was popping all around Haslip and Powell. Six-Seven Mike returned to its hangar, and the fire crews were back at the station around midnight.

No one could know that within four days, this single tree would feed the blaze that threatened the towns of Helmville and Lincoln.

Snowbank Fire is spotted

By 6 a.m. Aug. 13, Jay Lindgren was planning work assignments. His job is initial attack for the Forest Service, based in Lincoln, and it was his responsibility to allocate resources.

Lindgren sent one crew to what was called the Trail 418 Fire, another to a smoke in Cotter Basin, another to check out the burning tree in the Moose Creek area and one more to a possible fire near Trapper Mountain.

At 9:56 a.m., the head of the Moose Creek crew called dispatch and said the fire was "bigger than we knew. Need help."

Six-Seven Mike flew over it at 10:30, but Haslip wasn't alarmed. He said it was bigger than the previous day, but nothing serious.

Dispatch sent 362 to help out. Three-six-two -- the helicopter's tail number -- is a privately owned helicopter with a 250-gallon bucket. The helicopter had a contract with the state to fight fires last summer at a rate of $6,000 per day just to have it available, plus flight costs of $1,116 per hour.

Six-Seven Mike resumed its routine patrol route.

"We're flying to the east, just after we get past Heart Lake, when my pilot happened to see the smoke," Haslip said. "Of course, we immediately go there and report it to Lincoln and the Helena dispatch centers."

Pilot Powell turned the craft so Haslip, the observer, could have a better look and size up the quarter-acre blaze that would become the Snowbank Fire. Something about this smoke disturbed Haslip.

"He usually takes a systematic approach, sizing it up and watching its behavior," Powell said. "But something about this one -- he was real urgent on this. There was an unusual sense of urgency in his voice."

The struggle

Haslip gave dispatch the location of the fire and requested a helicopter and bucket be sent for initial attack. Lindgren headed to the fire, as did a couple of state-owned engines on the ground. It was about one-quarter acre.

"It was in a bunch of heavy fuel, burning real hot," Lindgren said. "It just kept wanting to go, but it wasn't windy yet so I thought we could hold it."

Lindgren said the only helicopter available was 362, and that was working what would become the Moose/Wasson fire. He faced a dilemma -- should he call it off the fire it was working, and possibly let that one get out of control, or let it finish up there and go to the Snowbank Fire later, possibly allowing it to run out of control?

"I had to determine where we could use it more effectively," Lindgren said.

"That probably was one of our key, pivotal points, where we lost it. You can debate it and speculate about it -- maybe it would have helped, maybe if we had a few more folks on the ground. But I think this was our seventh fire in two days and we were spread pretty thin."

What he didn't know was that another helicopter -- Nine-Eight Mike, a firefighting-equipped, state-owned craft dispatched out of Missoula -- was in the air over Ovando, having just finished a job. The crew heard the radio traffic and told dispatchers in Missoula that they were available. But Nine-Eight Mike was told it wasn't needed and returned to Missoula.

Lindgren is surprised when he heard this recently.

"I would have grabbed them in a heartbeat," he said. "I don't know if that was something lost in the chain of command, but the dispatch centers knew we were desperate."

Fisher said she had called Missoula -- which dispatches state aircraft to Lincoln -- but was told rather abruptly that nothing was available, that they were too busy and couldn't help. So she called Helena, which dispatches equipment for fires on federal lands near Lincoln.

"They told me they were going to launch someone as soon as possible," she said.

Lindgren also couldn't order 362 off of the Moose/Wasson fire, but had to wait for the Incident Commander there to release it. That happened at 12:11 p.m., but the helicopter had to refuel before heading toward Snowbank Lake. It was ready to fly at 12:40 p.m., and while they hooked up the bucket to make water drops at 12:54, Lindgren also requested a "Super Scooper," a small plane that pulls 5,000 gallons of water into its belly when flying over a large body of water and releases it on fires.

It was nearly 1 ½ hours after the Snowbank fire was first reported.

Bad deal

Lindgren's problems were just beginning. When 362 tried to make a bucket drop, the bucket wouldn't open.

"That probably was another pivotal point," Lindgren said. "If it had gone according to the book, according to the plan, we would have had it. But we were scattered too thin."

By 1:30 p.m., the bucket on 362 was working again and the crew at the Moose/Wasson Fire wanted it back. But they couldn't have it; the Snowbank Fire was at three acres, throwing sparks over firefighters' heads, and the Copper Creek Campground was being evacuated.

Within an hour, the Snowbank Fire was at 20-30 acres and Lindgren pulled all the crews off of it.

"Our hoses were burning over, the pumpers were burning over, basically it was a run for your life situation," said Bill Cyr, who heads DNRC's initial attack force and the Lincoln Volunteer Fire Department.

It was the first of many retreats Lindgren and his crews would suffer.

Twenty minutes later, at 3 p.m., a new fire was spotted near Snowbank Lake. Between its remote location and the hazard at hand, the Talon Fire didn't get much attention.

By the end of the day, two planes carrying retardant had worked the fire for about 2 ½ hours -- at a cost of about $18,800 -- along with 362. Crews and a bulldozer had managed to etch a defensive line in the soils. Two Super Scoopers also worked on it for about four hours, with their costs totaling $23,474 that day.

A discouraged Lindgren headed back to the dispatch center about 10:45 p.m.

"It was just like throwing snowballs at it. The intensity was something -- I've never really seen anything like it," Lindgren said.

Meanwhile, he had also decided that even while the Moose/Wasson Fire wasn't out, the crew had scratched a line in the earth around it, and it was too dangerous to leave them there overnight. It was an unusual decision, since crews are equipped with food and gear to stay on a fire until it is "dead out."

"It was dark, with boulders the size of houses, in dangerous country," Lindgren explained. "It's one of those places you don't want to leave people at -- there's tons of snags, and as I'm talking to them you can hear 'crash, crash, crash.'

"A lot of people criticized me for pulling people off that night, but that's my call. I've been doing this for 12 years, and ... my priorities are to keep everybody safe and get it out, in that order."

The least cost alternative

That first day set the scene for the next month, even though Lindgren and his crews only worked the fires until a Type I team took over the evening of Aug. 16.

Smokejumpers descended upon the Talon Fire the morning of Aug. 14, but were airlifted out within a few hours because of the dangerous conditions. Bulldozers and other heavy equipment arrived, but Lindgren could only use it on a limited basis on the Snowbank Fire because Copper Creek, which runs through the burned area, is home to the endangered bull trout and the crews needed to impact the stream as little as possible. What few firefighters they had were pulled from the Moose/Wasson blaze to work on the Snowbank, but it still grew to 100 acres by the end of the evening. And despite being bombed with retardant and water, the Talon Fire expanded to 500 acres.

Pulling the crews from the Moose/Wasson on Aug. 14 allowed to increase to 1,200 acres by Aug. 15 and threaten Helmville and Lincoln.

Meanwhile, initial attack crews were working new fires, extinguishing all within a day or so.

"We had 68 fires in Lincoln this summer, and caught 66 of them," Cyr notes. "The biggest season we had before was 48 starts."

But the fact is that even after the Snow/Talon and Moose/Wasson fires got away, they still weren't a priority at a national level. That meant that while they were able to get a lot of "heavy metal" -- bulldozers, water trucks and that type of equipment -- many of the national resources, like helicopters and firefighting crews, didn't trickle in for a week or longer.

"Lincoln was low on the (national) priority list, and I can't argue with that," Ruby said. "We had fires knocking on the door of a lot of communities, where they were doing direct structure protection and luckily, we didn't end up in that role."

Ruby adds that given the lack of resources, the decision was made locally to just try to herd the Snow/Talon Fire into the Scapegoat Wilderness and monitor it while letting Mother Nature extinguish it.

"When we analyzed what we were going to do with that fire, we looked at everything from full metal jacket suppression, lining the entire thing, to more of a hands off to what we ended up doing, which was full suppression on the south side and letting it burn freely into the wilderness," Ruby said. "That was multiple millions of dollars cheaper than trying to put a line around the whole thing. For the Lincoln Complex, this was the least cost alternative.

"Given that the fire was lost, it was getting very large and it burned very rapidly into the wilderness, I would not have been a proponent of going into the wilderness after it. When it hit the boundary it wasn't going very hard, and to be quite honest, in the wilderness there were areas where it did a lot of good."

Questions remain

That may be so, but Haslip and others remain irked at the system that supplied only minimal initial air attack and allowed the Lincoln complex fires to eventually consume more than 39,000 acres.

"I have the highest respect for our firefighters -- it's the system that's broke," Haslip said.

Lindgren doesn't go so far as to criticize the system, but acknowledges it was a painful fire season. To him, Copper Creek -- where the Snow/Talon Fire burned hot and heavy -- used to be a favorite place to play. Now, it's painful for him to visit the area.

Still, he remains philosophical about the Lincoln Complex.

"Did I make the right decisions? I've been going through that in my mind since then. Maybe I should have positioned people in other places. Maybe ... his voice trails off, then he adds "I've asked everyone what I could have done differently, but with the low fuel moistures, bucket problems, crews not getting there when I thought they were coming, you just can't get what you want -- I'm comfortable with my decisions. Nobody got hurt.

"You've got to play the cards that you're dealt. This was something that was bigger and better than us. I just wasn't holding very good cards."