Feeling Through Fire Part 4: When the Fire Comes

EDITOR’S NOTE: As Los Angeles battles the most destructive wildfires in the history of the city, and too many of its citizens discover what’s left—or isn’t—of their homes and property, we at Mountain Journal sought to connect readers with loss closer to home.

This article is part of a Mountain Journal series exploring our emotional relationship to wildfire through a collection of people who have varying relationships with the element. By presenting a mosaic of experiences, we hope to explore the complexity of one of the most dominant forces on Earth. Part 4 concludes this series and explores fire through the experiences of those that have faced burning homes and heritage lands.

“When the fire comes, leave quickly. The only recourse we have living in these dynamic places of wild beauty is to respect them.” –Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion

Tina Chiles had been watching the flames of the Meridian Fire last October from across the sea of sagebrush separating her home from the Cliff Lake Bench near Cameron, Montana. Flames licking at the lodgepole pine forest had her mesmerized, but she was stunned when her phone dinged at 3:13 p.m. with a message from an unknown number: “Effective immediately, the Madison County Sheriff’s Office has issued an evacuation warning for the Madison River Ranches Subdivision and surrounding areas south of Cameron, Montana.” Still plagued with lingering stress from hurricanes Helene and Milton, which had ravaged the Florida island she calls home when she’s not in Montana, Chiles sprayed the exterior of her house with water and planned for the worst.

The Meridian Fire was first reported on October 8, the cause undetermined. A week later, a Forest Service report estimated the wildfire had grown to more than 4,000 acres, and resources were primarily directed to protect structures just a half mile from the burn. With a low-hanging veil of smoke cast across the Madison Valley, the evacuation warning spurred the greater Ennis community into action: an RV park offered free space for evacuees, and other residents offered personal trailers for those without them. The Red Cross set up shelter in a local church, and an animal rescue offered temporary holding for pets. But before anyone could load their car and hightail it to the church, a night of snowfall quelled Meridian’s growth spurt, effectively canceling the evacuation warning.

My grandparents have a fishing cabin on the Madison River adjacent to Chiles’ house, and over the years I’ve gained an intimate relationship with the valley. When this land fell under the shadow of the Meridian Fire, I did what people often do when a loved one is sick, hurt or worse: I recalled the last moment I had with that place; a form I feared it may never take again. The flickering memory evoked the smell of crushed sage underfoot, the pink and green shimmer of rainbow trout in clear water, a coyote calling to a moon rising above the Lionhead Mountains. With the Meridian Fire trending toward burnout, this piece of the Madison Valley remains intact along with my memory of it, at least for now. But the evacuation scare sparks a reminder that on the scales of our emotional relationship to fire, loss weighs heavy at one end.

Wildfires have become a constant in Greater Yellowstone. The U.S. Government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment reports the annual area burned by high-severity wildfires has increased in the West eightfold since 1985. But before fire season had extended into the depths of October, as it did in 2024, Max Hjortsberg grew up in a relatively smokeless Livingston, 80 miles east of Ennis.

“For the first half of my life, [wildfire] was very rare and uncommon,” says Hjortsberg, now 50 and the managing director of the grassroots conservation nonprofit Park County Environmental Council. “And the second half of my life it’s kind of been a steady part of life and reality here in the West.”

Fire is both a cultural and ecological reality—but also a personal one. On a summer night in 2006, Hjortsberg drove down the Main Boulder Road south of Big Timber, Montana, with some friends and his father, the novelist and screenwriter William “Gatz” Hjortsberg. A lightning strike had ignited the Derby Fire, and an evacuation warning had been issued for a large area, including south of Big Timber where Gatz spent part of his time in a modest log cabin.

“It was very eerie,” Hjortsberg recalls. “You could see the fire burning in the night. It was glowing red."

With a caravan of cars and trucks behind him, Hjortsberg drove slowly toward the cabin, smoke shrouding his visibility on the road. When they pulled up, they acted swiftly before the flames found the log walls.

“There’s something when you’re in that moment, you're just very focused,” he continues. “You do what you can, and there’s the stress and the anxiety and worry, but also there’s a strange calmness … We were just loading everything of value that we could into the backs of our cars and our trucks. And then we drove out.”

The Derby Fire spared Gatz’s cabin, though the 200,000-acre blaze left 26 other homes in ashes. A few months later, the Jungle Fire would reignited the threat to the cabin, burning in the West Boulder drainage north of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Hjortsberg and his father again drove from Livingston to the cabin, this time towing a U-Haul to retrieve the belongings they couldn’t pack in the Derby evacuation.

“We knew the fire was right over the ridgeline,” Hjortsberg says. At one point, he thought he heard rain drops pattering on the trailer roof, but when he stuck his head outside, he saw incinerated pine needles falling from the sky.

“We just worked through as fast as we could,” he says. “We were resigned to the fact that all of it could be gone in the next day.” But they weren’t helpless. The Hjortsberg men got to work. They cut grass and low-lying limbs around the structure for defensible space, moved the outside woodpile and screened the space below the deck to keep out embers. Then the Sweet Grass County Deputy pulled up the driveway.

“He had this fearful look in his eyes. He said, ‘It’s time for you guys to go …You have to stop whatever you’re doing right now. Just put it down and drive out of here. It’s coming.’”

The Jungle Fire burned through the Hjortsberg property before a cold front blew in and put it out. But the cabin survived, thanks to their defensive tactics and support from an engine crew. Gatz took the entire crew and their families to the Grand Hotel in Big Timber for dinner.

A few years later, in 2012, yet another fire hit close to home for Hjortsberg, this time threatening his mom’s home in Paradise Valley. Marian Hjortsberg had lived in the small town of Pine Creek for decades. Her friend spotted the fire burning in dry grass soon after it started and stopped at her house to warn her. Marian grabbed photo albums, jewelry and her cat, and fled. Hjortsberg says when the fire was out a few days later, they returned to her home. It had been spared, covered in fire retardant. Some of her neighbors hadn’t been so lucky.

“That loss is pretty profound for the people who experience it,” Hjortsberg says, adding that it’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t. Still, he says victims of wildfire must convey to others how serious they can be.

“Fire can definitely teach us humility,” he says. “It's such a powerful and descriptive force that if we don't take it seriously, it can literally take everything from you, including your life.”

In her book of essays, Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams writes: “When the fire comes, leave quickly. The only recourse we have living in these dynamic places of wild beauty is to respect them.” As wildfires burn hotter, bigger and more frequently, many people are leaving quickly. And many people are left with loss. The number of homes burned in the U.S. has doubled in the last 30 years, and in 2022 alone, 4,446 people died as a result of wildfire. “How do we survive our grief in the midst of so many losses in the living world?” Tempest Williams asks.

There’s fear and resignation in leaving quickly. But when a place does burn, a home or property, there’s also grief. This was true for Katy Kelly in 2020, when her family’s generational property burned in the Bridger Foothills Fire.  

The day the fire started on September 4, Kelly was driving home to Bozeman from her office in Belgrade when she spotted a ribbon of smoke rising from the south end of the Bridger Mountains. The sight stirred the entire valley, but it was especially concerning for Kelly, whose family property is on the east side of the ridge. She arranged to meet her mother near the mouth of Bear Canyon, across the interstate where the view of their land, affectionately known as The West Side, was clearest. At the time, Kelly said she preserved her sanity by rationalizing the situation.

“Yes, it’s scary,” she told herself. “And yes, it’s close by. But fires get close a lot.”

By the next day the fire had erupted, leaving only a flicker of time between “get everything you can” and “it’s too late, leave it all behind.” For days while the Bridgers burned, all Kelly had was the memory of the property intact, as she had known it her entire life. The West Side had two distinct meadows separated by a creek and stands of Douglas-fir. She and her mother in 2007 had built a strawbale cabin in one of the meadows below her uncle’s place. Over the years, Kelly made a point to revisit special nooks and crannies at The West Side, spots infused not only with her personal memories but also three generations’ worth of stories that had accumulated since her grandparents bought the land 60 years ago.

When the family could finally visit the property a few days later, The West Side was no longer the enchanting place where she grew up. Much of the land was “pure black,” she says. Where trees once grew, black skeletons stood in their place. In some cases, nothing remained at all. Stumps smoldered, and the ground gaped with holes where roots had been. She recalls burnt cow dung, a charred frog. The cabins were completely gone. Scattered shards from Kelly’s mother's homemade ceramics were scant evidence that the strawbale cabin had ever existed.

“It was just a weird, very surreal feeling of being in a place that you just don't understand or don't belong,” Kelly says. The West Side remained this way for the winter, “stark, like a painting.” But that spring, the tone shifted. Baby plants popped up from the blackened ground. The  sold off timber from salvageable trees, and reseeded the barren land to prevent landslides.

“It’s different than it was, but it is starting to feel like its own place again,” Kelly says. She cries when she tells this story, a wound that’s healed though scarred. But the sense of regeneration that defines the land defines her too.

“I think my experience after the fire was a tragedy, and there was this period of time where it felt like the world was falling apart,” she says. “But I got to a place where I was like, ‘This is incredible and so beautiful, seeing spring happen.’”

The ending to Kelly’s story echoes Hjortsberg’s from more than a decade earlier when he returned to his father’s property on the Main Boulder.

“We left not knowing if we’d ever see the see the place again, and then we came back to see the landscape completely transformed,” Hjortsberg says, describing the regrowth of chokecherries and shrubs that rose where scorched trees had crumbled to ash. “We’re in such a fire-adapted ecosystem that to see it gradually regrow and come back was also … part of the whole experience. The fire wasn’t the end, it was a circle of life.”

Through the human eye, wildfire is defined by paradox, not contradiction; ideas that coexist, rather than compete. Fire gives us awe and destruction. It’s beautiful and melancholic. It’s tragic and regenerative. It asks us to try and make sense of it—to live with it. Our relationship to wildfire has much to teach us about living on scorched earth.    

“In the process of being broken open, worn down, and reshaped, an uncommon tranquility can follow,” Tempest Williams writes. “Our undoing is also our becoming.”