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The year 2000 brought one of the worst fire seasons in half a century to the United States. By the month of August, more than 4 million acres (an area greater in size than the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined) had been burned by wildfires, and dozens of blazes raged out of control in eleven western states, with nearly half of the conflagrations occurring in Idaho and Montana. On 6 August 2000, as several fires converged in the Bitterroot National Forest near the town of Sula in western Montana, John McColgan, a fire behavior analyst in the employ of the USDA Forest Service, snapped the spectacular photograph shown above with a digital camera and described the experience to a writer for the western Montana newspaper The Missoulian: After McColgan downloaded his amazing image to an office computer, a friend found it, e-mailed a copy to another friend, and by mid-September 2000 the picture was blazing its way across the Internet. Because many forwarded copies of the image lacked any attribution or explanation, e-mail recipients began to circulate rumors about its origins and authenticity — some claimed that the photo was snapped by a tourist, that it was taken during the extensive Yellowstone National Park fire of 1988, or that it was yet another digital fake. As John McColgan said afterwards, I couldn't have profited from [the photograph], so I guess I'm glad so many people are enjoying it. We're happy to help him at least receive proper credit for his work. This picture has also been circulated with text identifying it as a photograph of August 2003 forest fires in British Columbia, of October 2007 California wildfires, of the June 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the November 2016 forest fires in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
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