As Hot and Dry Conditions Take Shape in Montana, Officials Predict ‘Critical’ 2025 Wildland Fire Season

All indicators point to a challenging wildland fire season in Montana this summer, a meteorologist said Monday during the state’s annual fire season forecast, with hot and dry conditions, exacerbated by multi-year drought and global weather patterns, combining to potentially rival some of the state’s most critical wildland fire seasons in two decades.

“We’ve got some challenges forthcoming,” Dan Borsum, a Missoula-based forecaster with the Northern Rockies Coordinating Center, told Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte and agency administrators at the 2025 fire season briefing in Helena.

With forecasts calling for drier and hotter conditions than normal, Borsum characterized the 915-acre Banana Lake Fire that ignited near Plains over the weekend as a precursor to the severe conditions he predicts will elevate the wildfire risk across western Montana by July. Borsum told residents to prepare for an early start and a long fire season, especially if monsoon moisture doesn’t recharge seasonal grasses in late summer.

“We expect significant wildland fire activity to really start picking up across the western part of Montana in July,” Borsum said. “We have already seen some fires in Plains this weekend. That activity will expand into central and eastern Montana in the month of August and we expect it to stay in place through September. Drought is already profound in some parts of the state.”

Although this last winter delivered a snowpack that was marginally better in most parts of the state than the year prior, a spate of warm weather this spring has already depleted the mountain snowpack, which Borsum said he’d hoped would stay locked up in the high country later into June. Instead, most basins registered about 80% to 90% of their average snowpack by April 30, while May and June delivered above-average temperatures.

“Our recent hot weather has been doing a number on our snowpack,” Borsum said. “Unfortunately, even though we had more snow than we did in 2024, we have already gotten rid of it as quickly in a number of basins out there. That is a significant concern because high-elevation fires are more challenging, they are longer-living on the landscape and, unfortunately, the news is that we are probably going to see that area available for fire activity.”

Drought is another significant factor driving the dire prediction, Borsum said, with a 36-month precipitation deficit across western Montana “as dry as the early 2000s.” Those reduced soil moisture values mean less groundwater for trees, Borsum said, adding more stress to forests that will already be parched due to an early onset of sustained heat and dryness.

“The state looks to be set for it to be more challenging this year,” Borsum said.

Meanwhile, global weather patterns aren’t cooperating, either. The La Niña climate pattern has ended and neutral conditions are expected to persist through the Northern Hemisphere all summer, Borsum said, describing oceanic and equatorial temperatures that “have historically been associated with some of our critical years, like 2006, 2017 and 2021.”

“Unfortunately, a lot of those are some of our all-star years of fire activity,” Borsum said. The 2021 wildfire season included the Boulder 2700 fire, which burned 2,589 acres of forest, destroyed 14 homes, 17 structures, and forced the evacuation of thousands of Lake County residents. Emerging as one of the most high-profile wildfires in the nation in late July 2021, the Boulder 2700 fire was the result of arson.

Adding to this year’s challenging environmental factors, Borsum said forecasters are also predicting a weak monsoon season, which could stretch the fire season later into the summer and fall. A dry winter across the southwestern portion of the U.S. has already led to a moisture deficit that worsened as the region missed most of its spring precipitation, creating a heat dome over the Great Basin that Borsum predicted would push north into Montana.

Although June in Montana often starts wet but turns hot and dry during the second half of the month, that hasn’t been the case in western Montana. And while central Montana has received more moisture than the rest of the state, Borsum said hot and dry forecasts in July and August will erase the region’s spring moisture surplus.

“In June we are looking at below-normal moisture and above-normal temperatures, and June is considered a wet month,” Borsum said. “If we miss June moisture in this state we end up being in trouble with the fire season.”

Even as Borsum predicted a challenging fire season during the press conference at the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC) Aviation Hangar in Helena, land managers tried to inspire confidence by describing a high degree of preparedness and agency readiness, a commitment that Gianforte echoed when he pledged “our shared commitment to protect Montanans, our communities, and our lands from catastrophic wildfire.”

“Throughout the summer, we can expect dry and hot conditions to persist. Working together with our partners, we stand ready to respond with an aggressive initial attack to protect our communities,” Gianforte said.

In the last two legislative sessions, Gianforte said lawmakers passed important measures to improve forest health and protect communities from wildfire. In 2023, House Bill 883 allocated $60 million over the biennium to the DNRC to “significantly increase the pace and scale of management practices that improve forest health, reduce wildfire risk, and increase wildfire preparedness,” Gianforte said. House Bill 127, which Gianforte signed into law in April, will “continue these important investments,” the governor said.

DNRC Director Amanda Kaster said the measures help assure that fire preparedness will remain a priority in the 2025 session and that “DNRC is more prepared than ever.”

Ben South, a deputy regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Region, said the agency was prepared for the region’s fire season both in terms of strategy and resources, despite cuts to the agency’s workforce under the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that in recent months have included layoffs and a suspension of seasonal hiring.

“We have the same complement of hand crews and personnel, including 1,500 professional wildland firefighters, fire equipment and aviation contracts and continued staffing of interagency dispatch centers to support wildfire suppression, as in previous years,” South said.

Gianforte, describing an “increased commitment to expand our forest management,” also appeared confident in the level of preparedness of both state and federal agencies.

Robert Jones, the field specialist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) Rocky Mountain region, which serves seven tribes, said cuts to the tribal agency — including reductions to staff and the potential closure of BIA offices in Pablo and Poplar — have made it difficult to provide essential services.

“We have dwindled in our resources,” Jones said. “There have been changes. We have only one fire management officer at the Northern Cheyenne Agency [in southeast Montana], so that kind of tells you the story of the BIA.”

Despite those setbacks, Jones said “we have made some adaptations to actually overcome some of that,” including working with partners across other agencies and using a new organization chart that divided the agency into two zones. But that doesn’t backfill shortages to the BIA’s firefighting staff, which Jones said was essentially cut in half.

“Hopefully we can manage better as we get smaller in our resources, so that we’re less spread thin,” he said. “For our fire positions we have 90 positions that we have staffed. If we were fully staffed, we would be at 180 positions, so we’re down quite a bit.”

Jones said BIA will continue to support interagency fires with two helicopters and a Type 2 Initial Attack crew in Browning.

Last summer, 2,322 wildfires burned approximately 352,491 acres across Montana, with the largest wildfire, the Remington Fire in the southeast corner of the state, accounting for half of that total. In 2022, 2,087 fires burned about 137,500 acres in the state, while in 2023, 1,662 fires burned 123,133 acres — significantly less than the 10-year average of 372,454 acres in Montana.

As the drought forecasts take shape, Borsum, the predictive meteorologist, stressed the amount of moisture missing from the landscape, particularly on the western edge of the state, where deficits in some counties range from 8 to 16 inches.

“So, unfortunately that’s not great news but that’s what’s out there,” Borsum said. “The multi-year moisture deficits match the early 2000s and are starting to hurt us.”

“There’s a lot that I’m worried about as we head forward,” Borsum added.

For current fire information and additional tips on preventing human-caused wildfire, visit https://www.mtfireinfo.org/. Video of the governor’s 2025 Fire Season Briefing is available here. Borsum’s fire forecast presentation is available here.

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