Prescribed fires planned across Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest through 2026

Prescribed fire is the tradeoff Helena-area officials are making now to avoid a worse wildfire season later: more smoke and temporary disruption in the short term, less fuel on the ground when summer fire weather turns dangerous. Across the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, crews are using planned burns to thin overgrown vegetation, reduce wildfire severity and give firefighters more room to work when lightning or human-caused fires break out.

The Forest Service advanced its Forest-wide Prescribed Fire Project on July 22, 2025, covering about 2.3 million acres across seven island mountain ranges and the Continental Divide. The project excludes Designated Wilderness and Research Natural Areas, but it still reaches deep into central Montana communities and drainages that sit inside the forest’s full 2.8 million- to 2.9 million-acre land base. Officials say the work is designed to allow up to 40,000 acres a year of fuel treatments, a shift meant to restore forest health, protect communities and reduce future wildfire management costs.

Agency materials say the forest historically averaged about 78,000 acres of low- or mixed-severity fire each year and more than 20,000 acres of high-severity fire, but current conditions no longer match that pattern. The prescribed-fire plan is meant to push the landscape back toward something closer to that natural cycle while improving wildlife habitat, watershed function, tree vigor and resistance to disease and drought. Forest officials describe prescribed fire as a planned fire, sometimes called a controlled burn, used to benefit natural resources and reduce the risk of unwanted wildfire.

The most immediate impacts for Lewis and Clark County residents have already shown up near Helena and along Highway 12. InciWeb documented a 700-acre burn in the Brooklyn Divide area on March 2, a 350-acre burn in Favorite Gulch on March 3, and about ten hand piles burned five miles west of Helena, south of Highway 12, on March 6. Those burns were part of the Johnny Crow Habitat Improvement Project, aimed at cutting back conifer encroachment in grassland and shrubland habitat.

The work also spread into nearby Broadwater County, where roughly 2,000 acres burned in the Elkhorn Mountains near Radersburg using helicopter aerial ignitions. Through spring 2026, weather permitting, residents near Helena, the Highway 12 corridor, the Brooklyn Divide and Favorite Gulch should watch official InciWeb updates for smoke, changing visibility and short-notice access changes. In the woods west of town, prescribed fire is no longer a background land-management effort. It is one of the Forest Service’s main tools for shaping what wildfire season will look like later.