Karen and I just got back from a trip up to Montana to Mann Gulch and then we went to Glacier National Park and then came back down the panhandle of Idaho and visited a hot spring I went to years ago when I was on a fire up there.My visit to Mann Gulch was a dream come true for me since I had read so much about the fatalities there that happened in 1949. There were 13 smoke jumpers who died there and each one has a cross where they found his body on the hillside. I tried to take pictures of each of them but only found 12 of the 13. I must have missed it but the slope was steep and it was a long hike in there and I didn't have much time to look since we had taken the tour boat and we had a tight time frame to catch the last one of the day out of there.
Karen made it to the ridge but I left her there and went by myself down into the gulch.The second picture is one I took from near the bottom looking up slope to where the fatalities occurred. There had been a recent fire up there and you can see the burned spot at the top of the ridge and most of the crosses were in that general area but below it. The whole gulch is nothing like it used to be back in 1949, most of the trees were burned and it is almost all grass land now. I looked at some areal photo's of the place taken in 1949 and it was not completely forested, but the lower section had plenty of smaller reproduction that must have given the fire a good head of steam as it burned up canyon. The one thing I really paid attention to was the slope. It was really steep up where the guys died and I could see why they couldn't outrun the fire. I'll be posting all of my pictures on my web album maybe tomorrow.
After we left Mann Gulch we headed up to Glacier National Park and went across to the upper panhandle of Idaho and came down through Sand Point and Coeur d'Alene and through McCall. We had a couple of rainy days so we got motel rooms for 2 nights and finally spent the last night camping in the Boise National Forest after soaking in the Silver Creek Plunge, a hot spring I had stayed at around 20 years ago where they had fire camp there. It was really nice and we had a great trip, rain not withstanding.
