Current stats on Montana’s 2022 fire season: Fire locations, burn sizes, air quality and news coverage
Tracking Montana’s 2021 fire season
With an expansive drought drying out vegetation across the state, 2021 was a particularly active year for Montana wildfires. Montana Free Press tracked the season on this page with hourly updates on the location and size of fires reported in Montana, as well as air quality ratings for communities with monitoring stations.
With cold weather bringing the 2021 fire season to a close in mid-October, MTFP has shifted this page to archive status, summarizing the available data on how the state fared over the course of the summer.
The display below includes the last reported updates provided for the 2021 wildfires that were tracked by the Inciweb incident information system and may exclude fires that aren’t reported through that system. In some cases information for specific fires may be incomplete where agencies haven’t updated Inciweb entries. Fire names in the table below link to more information on the Inciweb website.
Even in the midst of a widening, deepening drought, far fewer acres have burned in Montana than land managers anticipated. But things could change soon.
As wildfires worsen across the U.S., job uncertainty is combining with a growing mental health crisis and threatening the lives of wildland firefighters.
