The Fiery Arc

Lighting the panoramic horizons in every direction, insatiable tongues of fire lapped steadily across Alaska last week in the worst series of forest fires that the state has seen in nearly a decade. Culminating a summer in which more than 200 fires have occurred, the biggest fire of all raged around the Fortymile River's West Fork, consuming the black spruce, cottonwood and paper birch and turning the green hills to barren black. At week's end, six other major fires spreading across a 500-mile arc still ravaged the nation's largest state.

As Large as Rhode Island. So far, the fires have devastated more than 650,000 acres of woods and tundra--an area roughly as large as Rhode Island. One fire jumped the Taylor Highway near the Canadian border, making the road impassable at times; others raged along the Alaska Highway. Around Fairbanks, smoke from the Salcha River fire 45 miles away became so dense that visibility was reduced to half a mile. The mining town of Chicken on the Taylor

Highway was nearly engulfed by the West Fork blaze, which has been burning for more than a month; the flames were stopped just two miles out of town. In north central Alaska, a fire near Bear Mountain on the Koyukuk River was also diverted just short of the Eskimo village of Huslia, but it burned on.

The Bureau of Land Management used almost 2,000 men to combat the fires. Six hundred men equipped with bulldozers, helicopters and Army personnel carriers struggled to contain the West Fork holocaust by bulldozing a line in its path. Smoke jumpers, some of them imported from Montana, parachuted into the forests with digging equipment; six converted B-25 bombers dropped chemical retardants on the fires. 150 Years to Grow. Normally, rain controls the blazes that start each summer, but this has been an extraordinarily dry season for Alaska. Chicken, for example, has had no rain since early May. Though lightning started most of the blazes, the woods are so parched that any ignition will do. The Goldstream fire 30 miles west of Fairbanks was started by sparks from a train's hot brake shoe, and an artillery shell fired in military maneuvers is believed to have started the Salcha fire.

Part of the affected territory is uninhabited wasteland of little value, but much of it is valuable timberland where losses will amount to millions of dollars. For Alaskans, money and inconvenience are not the only toll: they worry about the wildlife that is endangered. The West Fork, Cement Creek and Matson Creek fires are burning through some of the finest caribou grazing lands in the state. The herds feed on forest-floor vegetation called "caribou moss," which takes between 100 and 150 years to grow.

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