Early Days in the Forest Service Volume 4

KOOTENAI FOREST - 1940
By Ernie Richards

INCIDENT #1

I had just come in off the East Fisher River Fire a day or so before when I received a call from the Supervisor, Karl A. Klehm, to go to the Libby airfield and meet the plane that was coming to drop a hundred man fire camp by parachute on the Bull Lake Fire. I had been running a pack string packing grub and other fire supplies in to the Fisher River fire for a couple of days, and now Mr. Klehm wanted me to help the Pilot get the plane gassed up and help load the plane with the necessary equipment to put in a hundred man fire camp up in the top of the mountains so they could work on the upper side of the fire without having to hike clear up over the mountain to get to it.

When I got over to the airfield, I discovered it was Dick Johnson with one of their tri-motor Ford planes. When Dick saw me he said, "Ernie, you are just the man I'm looking for; I need a cargo dropper. My regular dropper is sick and can't come, and I don't have anyone to throw out the cargo at the drop area." I told him we would have to get the Supervisor's OK first, but if it was all right with him I would be glad to help him out. I called the Supervisor and asked if it would be all right for me to do that. and he said it was all right with him, if I didn't mind doing it. So I took Dick over town so he could get some lunch and get the gas man to come over to gas up the plane. Then we started loading up the plane with grub, fire tools, camp equipment, sleeping bags and a short-wave radio. While we were loading the plane, Mr. K. D. Swan, the Forest Service photographer, came over to the field and set up his camera and started taking pictures of the loading process. When we got the plane loaded, we took off for Bull Lake. Dick circled the area a couple of times to get familiarized with the location of the drop spot before he had me start dropping the cargos. Right after I kicked out the first bundle, I placed one hand against each side of the doorway and looked out to see if the 25-man ration box I had just kicked out was going to land in the camp spot, and while I was looking out the plane hit a down draft and dropped several feet about straight down, and the top of the doorway hit me on the back of my head right at the base of my skull and slightly stunned me which almost caused me to fall out the door. I managed to push myself back away from the door and then sat down while we were circling around for another pass, and by the time we got about half way around I was all right again. So I got up and got another bundle of stuff ready to kick out. Needless to say, I never tried that again, and we got the rest of the stuff dumped out in good shape. It took us two days to get all the material for the hundred man camp dropped in place.

My wife and I were staying in a tourist cabin across the river from town, while we were looking for a house, at this time. Mr. K. D. Swan and his wife were staying in the cabin next to ours while he was taking pictures of the cargo loading and dropping procedure. The first night, after we had supper, we were all sitting out in front of the cabins talking, and Mr. Swan told me he had been on the mountainside, across from where we were dropping the stuff for the camp, taking pictures of the bundles as they drifted down by parachute. So I told him he almost got a picture of me going down without a parachute, and then told him what had happened. He said he was glad I was lucky enough to keep from falling out.

Some time after that I had to go to Spokane after a load of freight, and had to go into the warehouse office to sign some papers, and there on the wall was an enlarged picture of me carrying a bundle of stuff into the Ford Tri-motor the day I was helping load the plane when we were putting in the hundred man fire camp on the Bull Lake Fire.

I don't know what ever became of that picture after they moved the warehouse out of the old Marshal Wells building on East Trent Avenue over to the building the Forest Service rented on South Howard Street. I wish I had a copy of that picture and also some of the ones Mr. Swan took while we were dropping the camp in for the Bull Lake Fire. That fire was in July, I believe, of 1940.

That was a real bad fire year for the Kootenai Forest, because we had one dry lightning storm after another, and in about three weeks time we had over four hundred fires. Luckily, most of them were just spot or real small ones. The big ones, as I remember, were as follows: The East Fisher River Fire, the Lake Creek Fire South of Troy, Montana; the Mount Tom Fire at or near the head of Pipe Creek; the Quartz Creek Fire Northwest of Libby; the Bull Lake Fire, and the Caribou Creek Fire North of the Upper Ford Ranger Station near the Canadian Border.

INCIDENT #2

They were bringing in a big horse-truck load of pack mules to the Mount Tom Fire, and while going up Pipe Creek the driver got too close to the edge of the road on a sharp curve, and the edge of the road gave away and the truck tipped over spilling all the mules out in the creek. It skinned a few of them up a little, but not bad enough to worry about. I was headed back to Libby after setting up a Pacific Pumper unit at the base fire camp, and came along right after it happened. Shortly after that, Fred Thieme came along and, after getting cable and block and tackle riggin, and with Fred's and the CCC mechanic's help, I rigged up a kind of a three-way hitch on the truck and a big rock up the hillside a ways and then up the road to a dozer they had called off the fire line, and finally got the truck back on its feet again without doing too much damage to the truck.