1967 Fire Season, Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park burned more frequently throughout its history than almost any other national park in the United States. Starting in 1910, the National Park Service persistently extinguished all wildfires that occurred within parks, but Glacier’s severe fire season in 1967 helped to end this suppression policy.

Throughout the early twentieth century, Glacier National Park in Montana utilized suppression, which required federal land management agencies to extinguish all forest fires. This approach gained national support after millions of acres of land burned in Idaho and Montana in 1910, including about 60,000 acres in Glacier. When 50,000 acres of Glacier burned in 1926, the National Park Service began to formulate official firefighting in the park. By 1929, Chief Forester John D. Coffman drafted the first national park fire management plan to organize firefighters and their equipment at Glacier. During the same year, the Half Moon Fire burned 50,000 acres in Glacier and destroyed numerous buildings. Coffman used analyses of Half Moon to revise and expand his initial strategy, making suppression an integral part of park policy.

In the 1960s, NPS developed a scientific approach to park management that changed the way it approached wildfires, but individual parks rarely aligned their management procedures with these ideas. In 1963, the Advisory Board on Wildlife Management, created by Interior Secretary Stuart Udall, published the Leopold Report. It stated that flames played a key role in maintaining healthy forests, advising administrators to contain wildfires and allow them to burn. Without routine burning, plant materials accumulated on the forest floor, fueling more destructive blazes. However, decades of fighting fires pushed park managers to fear the damage they caused. For decades, NPS managed forests to create attractive landscapes for visitors, and burned forests challenged this idealized image. As such, Glacier’s revised 1965 management plan upheld suppression.

In 1967, a significant drought and hot, windy weather created optimal conditions for flames to spread in Glacier. On August 11, 1967, lightning sparked approximately twenty-one fires throughout the park, including the Glacier Wall and Flathead blazes. They continued burning for a month despite containment efforts. The Office of Emergency Preparedness declared Glacier and the national forests surrounding it a national disaster area, contributing federal funding and labor to put out the flames. 1967 became the most destructive fire season Glacier had seen since 1929, and about 90,000 acres in the park burned.

The 1967 season quickly sparked a debate between the Park Service and the public over suppression. NPS officials contrasted it with the 1910 season  it to display the effectiveness of the policy, noting that less acres burned and less people died in the 1967 fires. However, inholders, who owned cabins, ranches, and hotels in Glacier, blamed the Park Service for mismanaging burns that damaged their properties. One vocal inholder, Montana Senator Burton Wheeler, brought these criticisms to national attention, prompting NPS to reassess its firefighting policies. In 1968, the Park Service acknowledged the ecological benefits of fire in the Green Book, a policy document that established budgets and dictated management policies for the entire park system. Revising this document made changing the suppression policy an issue of national importance. By 1977, Glacier’s management plan allowed natural fires to burn.

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