Wilderness crews work western Wyoming’s Dollar Lake Fire as it approaches Squaretop

About two dozen wilderness firefighters are shuttling regularly across lower Green River Lake to help corral the Dollar Lake Fire as it burns through steep country toward Squaretop Mountain.

Two teams specializing in wilderness fire strategy assembled Sunday to boat and hike into the popular recreation area on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Their deployment marks a new front on the blaze that’s covered 19,087 acres since it was discovered Aug. 21 along a dirt road heavily used for car and van camping.

Firefighters have not determined the cause of the blaze, according to the Forest Service.

Incident Commander Richard Hayner and his Wyoming Team 2 are wary about the rugged wilderness country and how difficult it would be to evacuate an injured firefighter, Karsten Milek, a BLM employee on the team said.

“It’s just a really tough, challenging area,” Milek said, “and medically extracting folks out of there, if something were to happen, would be extremely difficult.”

From the trailhead at the outlet of lower Green River Lake, the fire has burned about six miles to the south along the western side of the valley leading to Squaretop. The area, closed by the Forest Service because of the blaze, is heavily used by hikers, paddlers, hunters, climbers and trail riders.

The closure, which Forest Supervisor Chad Hudson expanded on Thursday, includes the Highline Trail portion of the Continental Divide Trail between the Clark Creek Trail and Union Pass Road. Altogether, 485 firefighters are working on the Dollar Lake Fire, which was 32% contained Sunday morning.

Near the fire’s point of origin at Dollar Lake, officials have relaxed evacuation notices for the Kendall community and are shoring up protection there and at other developed sites.

Wilderness specialists

The Wilderness squads, known as the Idaho Central and King’s Peak fire modules, enlist up to a dozen firefighters trained to assess and fight in rugged, remote areas. They are ensconced at a spike camp at the Green River Lakes Campground.

“They do a lot of the input for fire progression and the studies of terrain and the topography and how fire can move within those challenging areas,” said Milek, the team’s planning operations section chief who works with the BLM’s High Plains District in Wyoming. The crews can fight fire like any other hand crew, “but they do specialize on kind of the scientific end,” he said.

Rocky ground, cliffs, avalanche paths, landslides and talus slopes may provide fire breaks on the path toward Squaretop. The Squaretop front is in the Forest’s roadless Bridger Wilderness at the north end of the Wind River Range, where motors, wheels, chainsaws and other mechanized tools are prohibited.

The wilderness crews are looking for places they could “tie those natural barriers in together with the least exposure to firefighters,” Milek said. “There is also quite a bit of water in the bottom of the drainages that are also going to be natural barriers,” he said.

The crews have not asked for permission to use chainsaws, he said.

“The actions that we’re taking are based on firefighter safety and the highest probability of success with the really rugged terrain,” Milek said. “We have to take [rescue] into consideration and who we can put in and what kind of risk we’re exposing them to.”

Stan Decker Cannon said Sunday he is grateful firefighters saved what’s left of his family’s ranch at the outlet of Green River Lakes. The Forest Service now owns the historic house that was built in the 1950s.

His grandfather, Stan Decker, first saw Squaretop 100 years ago on a hunting trip with Harold Fabian. Fabian was John D. Rockefeller’s representative in the secret purchase of Jackson Hole land that would become part of Grand Teton National Park.

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Decker bought what became the GP Bar Ranch (GP for Gannett Peak) during the Great Depression and turned it into a small, exclusive retreat for well-heeled international notables. A lake high above the ranch and now almost surrounded by fire was named Valaite (Va-late) after Stan Cannon’s grandmother.

“I was told the fire took two runs at Grandad’s house that crews had to beat back,” Cannon wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “Thank you to all the firefighters on the Dollar Lake Fire who saved his house.”