On the afternoon of August 20, 1910 a wildfire like no other in American history raced up northern Idaho's St. Joe River Valley. Driven by eastbound winds approaching 90 miles an hour, it topped the Idaho-Montana divide in a matter of hours, then plunged down the St. Regis River Canyon. It two terrifying days and nights, the conflagration destroyed some three million acres of timber and killed 85 people, most of them firefighters recruited on Spokane, Washington's Skid Row

            Much has been written about the fire, most recently two fine books, Steve Pyne's Year of the Fire: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 and Timothy Egan's The Big Burn. Betty Spencer's The Big Blowup and Hal Rothman's I'll Never Fight Fire with my Bare Hands Again, both fine anecdotal histories, and Orland Scott's Pioneer Days on the Shadowy St. Joe, which includes Rev. Scott's amazing eyewitness description of the fire. But the finest wildfire story ever written is Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, a midnight page-turner for sure about the August 1948 Mann Gulch Fire.

            The West's great wildfires - including the 1910 fire - have been either the focal point or the impetus for eight issues of Evergreen Magazine, seven of which appear on this website. Click here for The Best of Evergreen, then click on the following issues: Winter 2006-2007, Spring 2006, July 2004, August, 2003, May 2003, Summer 2002 and Winter, 2000. The eighth issue, The West Is Burning Up, was published in the days before computers and is no longer available, though many believe it is the one of the finest wildfire tutorials ever written.

            Of the celebrations planned this year, it will be hard to beat the 2010 annual meeting of the Inland Empire Society of American Foresters. The meeting will occur in Wallace, Idaho May 20-22. Half of Wallace was burned down in the 1910 fire. Click here to pull up a copy of the agenda. Among the most interesting guests are Bob Sallee, the last survivor of the Mann Gulch tragedy ad Dick Rothermel, a retired fire behavior scientist who Norman Maclean interviewed for Young Men and Fire.

            Steve Pyne, Bob Mutch ad Stan Cohen are also on the program. Cohen has written widely on the 1910. Mutch, who is retired now, worked in fire research at the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station. He has appeared on dozens of programs over the years, warning - again and again - about what will happen to the West's great forests if the federal government does not soon get serious about thinning in overstocked dead and dying forests. We first met Mutch at a 1994 conference in Spokane. He is an excellent speaker and a walking encyclopedia where wildfire is concerned.

            Jerry Williams is also on the program - and will be worth a listen. Williams worked in the Forest Service's Fire and Aviation Management division for many years, and has written a fine new book titled, The U.S. Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest.Williams' presentation is titled, "Can An Event Like 1910 Happen Again?" It no only can, it will. It is only a matter of time.

            If you'd like to read my speech about my grandmother's escape from the 1910 Fire, click here. She was quite a lady - maybe the only woman in Idaho to ever own and operate a sawmill.