By Isabella Breda / The Seattle Times
Flames began to twirl and dance in the crowns of evergreens below Matt Bishop and Steve Cooper. In just a half-hour, a distant plume of smoke had become fire surrounding their route off Baring Mountain in the North Cascades.
It was a hikers’ nightmare scenario.
Cooper sent an SOS notification from his satellite communicator with their coordinates to an emergency response coordination center. He called his partner and 911.
The two poured water on their thin rain jackets to tie around their faces as the orange haze of dense smoke made it harder for them to breathe, see each other and find an exit.
A local sheriff’s deputy had instructed them to shelter in place while they figured out a potential rescue effort. The deputy soon reported back that a helicopter couldn’t safely fly in to rescue them.
“It’s a raging forest fire,” Bishop said. “We heard just a roar like a jet engine and saw flames come up over the hill in front of us. And then you just feel the heat wave.”
The Bolt Creek fire that erupted in early September 2022, trapping the two hikers within an erratic pattern of windblown fire, may have been a dress rehearsal for longer fire seasons, and those that span west of the Cascade crest.
With hotter, drier summers fueled by human-caused climate change coupled with more than a century of fire suppression, Washington and the rest of the Western U.S. will likely see more fire each year. The hikers’ story illustrates the heightened risks people can face on mountains shaped by fire.
For those exploring the backcountry, running into a wall of flames is generally avoidable, but officials are urging caution. Earlier this year, hikers found themselves stuck on a trail near Lake Chelan as the Pioneer fire made its way along the northeast shores. The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office rescued them by boat.
Next week is going to be cooler, which will help tamp down some fire activity, said Matt Dehr, a meteorologist for the state Department of Natural Resources. But he expects another hot and dry period for latter third of the month.
Washington has already seen more acres burned this year than 2022 and 2023 totals.
A landscape shaped by fire
Research has shown that human-caused climate change has contributed to drying fuels and doubled the acres burned in Western U.S. forests since the mid-1980s
In Washington, that has largely materialized in more area burned in wildfires, larger fires with more high-severity fire and longer fire seasons, said Crystal Raymond, a research scientist at the University of Washington and deputy director of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative.
But climate change isn’t the only factor. Past management practices including suppressing wildfires, removing of Indigenous burning, harvesting large trees and more fire-tolerant species, and more human-caused ignitions all contribute and have primed Eastern Washington for bigger, more severe and more frequent fires.
It’s harder to draw the connection between climate change and fires west of the Cascade crest, Raymond said, because fire is so rare on the west side and there’s just less fire in the recent historical record.
Wind is critical to large fires west of the crest, and winds aren’t expected to change with climate change. But hotter, drier conditions with human-caused climate change are expected to increase fire risk even west of the Cascade crest.
Generally, climate change is expected to drive wetter springs, which allows for an explosion in grassy fuels. By early summer they cure, dry out and are ripe for fire. Invasive grasses, like cheatgrass, are excellent at carrying a torch.
To have fire, you need three things, said Guillame Mauger, Washington state climatologist. An ignition, which could be from a campfire, cigarette, lightning or downed power line. Fuel — such as dry grasses and timber. And fire weather: hot temperatures, dry air and strong winds.
All three are affected by climate change, but the latter two more directly.
“The fact that we’ve had warming means it’s more likely to happen,” Mauger said. “We would expect the odds to be tilted in that direction. But there’s all these other factors that are important.”
Washington has seen about 2 degrees of warming from the 1900 annual average temperature, Mauger said.
Washington’s average temperature in the month of July was about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. And precipitation was about 23% of normal.
August is typically the state’s peak fire danger season, said Dehr, the DNR meteorologist. There’s not really any indication that it’s going to let up and slow down from here, he said: The state is going to burn more acres, there’s still going to be new fires on the landscape and resources to respond to new fires are already almost tapped out.
“As much as climate change is contributing to the problem and giving us more fire, living with fire is just part of living in the West,” Raymond said. “People need to find a way to live with fire and not have the idea that this is going to go away. Because, in fact, we need more of the right kind of fire on the landscape.”
Facing the flames
Rocks and logs fell down the hillsides above Bishop and Cooper as they began to cut a path down the mountain.
After running into some — to Cooper, many — dead-ends with cliffs and tall brush, they found an avalanche chute.
Wading through what was at times chest-high devils club, ferns, thorny berry bushes and other greenery they tripped and tumbled down the mountain. Their feet often lost traction, stepping between the melon-sized boulders, Cooper said.
“We had to keep moving because we could hear the fire behind us,” Cooper said.
At midafternoon, they ran out of water. They had each packed about 2 liters when they headed out before 7 a.m. They got ahold of relatives in an attempt to confirm the road was still safe and open and continued treading on.
From the avalanche chute they crossed a boulder field and a thick patch of vine maple, and emerged in an area with less underbrush.
“That’s when I knew we were going to make it,” Bishop said. “Up till that point it was very hard, slow going, every step was a challenge.”
They raced down the final stretch, back on the trail. Unlike the movies, Cooper said, where a rescue team is waiting to meet you at the exit and provide medical care for smoke inhalation or cuts and scrapes, all they found in the parking lot was Bishop’s Jeep.
They lobbed in their packs and hauled down the gravel road to an empty Highway 2 where an anxious ranger was relieved to see them. As they stumbled into a gas station in Sultan, Snohomish County, they told a local resident that they were the two stranded hikers everyone was worried about.
“The first two weeks after I was like ‘Whoa I’m alive,’ but I couldn’t comprehend that I was still alive,” Cooper said. “There was a point that we said our goodbyes.”
The two returned to the Bolt Creek burn scar the next spring to share their story with High Country News.
Cooper said his biggest message to others is to do your research before heading out — check for red flag warnings, smoke conditions — and if it’s safe to go, pack for the unexpected.
“Have an exit plan,” Cooper said.
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