This two-mile trail
will take you to The Pulaski Tunnel.
There, during two days in August 1910, Ranger "Big Ed" Pulaski, in the midst of a raging inferno, saved the lives of all but 6 of his 45-man crew.
The firestorm that Pulaski and his crew survived was the climax, "The Big Blowup," to the summer-long fight against hundreds of fires burning in Idaho and Montana.
Pulaski and his crew could not have realized that their story and the story of the 1910 fires would change the way the public viewed forest first and the way public agencies responded to them.
"During the summer of 1910 forest fires were everywhere in the Coeur d' Alene Mountains of northern Idaho.
For weeks there had been no rain and the woods were drier than I had ever seen them.
The intense heat of the sun, combined with strong winds which sprang up during the day, served to scatter the fires in all directions.
Crews of several hundred mem were working twenty-four hours a day throughout the mountains, endeavoring to hold back the fires"
Edward C. Pulaski 1923
Fire has a History Here
"Repeated surface fires leave a sequence of overlapping scars which extend into the annual ring wood tissues and can be dated to the calendar year."
The
forest fires that trapped Pulaski's crew were not unique.
Fires have been sweeping through these forests for thousands of years.
Healing "fire scars" in growth rings of thick-barked trees like ponderosa and western larch show fire ecologists the repeated patterns of intense burning that have occurred. In fact, many area plants and animals depend on fire for their very survival.
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