Word: forks
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...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...
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...
...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...
...just head for my cabin at Lake Fork to do some fishing," said Governor Robert E. Smylie the morning after, "and chew on the grass, I guess." Bob Smylie, 51, had a lot to chew on. The dean of the nation's Governors, he had given Idaho twelve years of progressive Republican leadership that attracted industry, reorganized the state-parks system, streamlined the state government and, in the process, established himself as something of a national figure, particularly in his post as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Yet Idaho's Republican voters had just dumped...
...another daredevil adventure by the U.S.'s most publicly athletic family. With 14 assorted youngsters in tow, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, Astronaut John Glenn and a platoon of guides piled into World War II rubber landing craft and shot nearly 100 miles of boiling rapids in the Middle Fork of Idaho's Salmon River. It is known as "the River of No Return," and the poor guides thought that was for sure. The place is full of dangerous rocks and swirling eddies; so naturally every time a guide stood up to see what lay ahead, some fun-loving...