As they approached the fire from uphill, unexpected winds caused it to suddenly intensify and grow rapidly, cutting off the men's route to safety, forcing them to turn back.

During the next few minutes, they were overrun by the wind driven grass fire which fatally burned 12 smokejumpers and a ground-based firefighter.

The United States Forest Service drew lessons from the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire by designing new training techniques and safety measures that developed how the agency approached wildfire suppression and emergency management.

[3] The 1952 film Red Skies of Montana, starring actor Richard Widmark and directed by Joseph M. Newman, was loosely based on the events of the Mann Gulch fire.

[1] A sign is placed near Mann Gulch to memorialize the tragedy, and can be seen from the waters of the nearby Missouri River.

The fire started when lightning struck south of Mann Gulch, a tributary of the Missouri River that cuts through steep terrain for approximately five miles ( 8 km ) in the Gates of the Mountains,[5][6][7] The place was noted and named by Lewis and Clark on their journey west in 1805.

Harrison, a college student at Montana State University, was working the summer as recreation and fire prevention guard for the Meriwether Canyon Campground.

[10] On this day, he fought the fire on his own for four hours before he met the crew of smokejumpers who had been dispatched from Hale Field, Missoula, Montana, in a Douglas DC-3.

Several factors that combined to create the disaster are described in Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire.

The C-47/DC-3 "Miss Montana" (a name applied during the eventual restoration, not used at the time of the fire and use by Johnson), registration number NC24320, was the only smokejumper plane available at Hale Field, near the current location of Sentinel High School, on August 5, 1949, when the call came in seeking 25 smokejumpers to fight a blaze in a hard-to-reach area of the Helena National Forest.

Dodge instructed the team to move off the front of the fire, and instead "sidehill" (keeping to the same contour or elevation), and cross over to the thinly forested and grass-covered south-facing slope, north of the stream, where they would move "down gulch" (west towards the confluence between Mann Gulch and the Missouri River).

Various side ridges running down the slope obscured the crew's view, so they could not see the conditions further down the gulch, and they initially continued to move toward the fire.

When Dodge finally got a glimpse of what was happening, he turned the men around and started them angling back up upslope and up the gulch.

Diettert, one of the most intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with him, took his shovel and leaned it against a pine tree.

Just a little further on, Rumsey and Sallee passed the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted.

Diettert had been just to the right, slightly upgulch of Sallee and Rumsey, but he did not drop back to the crevice and continued on up the right side of the hogback.

Though he and Joseph Sylvia initially survived the fire, they suffered heavy injuries and both died in the hospital the next day.

Dodge actually wrote, in his statement to the board of review, "There were three extreme gusts of hot air that almost lifted me from the ground as the fire passed over.

"[22] Young Men and Fire attributed the story to Earl Cooley, the spotter and kicker aboard the airplane,[21] who had rebuffed Maclean's overture to collaborate and proceeded to publish his own book.

But the mistaken story actually originated with C. E. "Mike" Hardy, who was the head of the litter bearers collecting the bodies the day after the disaster, and spoke with Dodge then as they sat on a log.

They arrived at the patients, both of whom had not yet been moved, and administered morphine and a quart (≈1 liter) of plasma to each—[25] Hellman 12:45 am, Sylvia at 1:50,[26] roughly 7 and 8 hours post-injury.

In answering the questions of the Forest Service Review Board as to why he took the actions he did, Dodge stated he had never had to use an escape fire before,[34] and it was not explicitly taught; but he was trained to get into a burned area for safety and thus it seemed logical.

Schmidt's 1996 letter to Starr Jenkins opined that Dodge had calmly selected an area of least fuel and performed the maneuver "without flinching.

"[38] Another of Dodge's contemporaries, James Arthur “Smokey” Alexander (1918–2014) said that setting escape fires was an "emergency exit procedure" that he had used in the 1930s.

It was originally thought that the unburned patches underneath the bodies indicated they had suffocated for lack of air before the fire caught them.

[40] However, the unburned patches are called protected areas as their bodies shielded the underlying grass and forest litter from the intense thermal radiation, by keeping out hot gases, and absorbing heat.

"Miss Montana", the C-47/DC-3 that carried the smokejumpers that day, was later placed on exhibit in Missoula at the Museum of Mountain Flying.

The aircraft was restored as a memorial to the smokejumpers and the fire guard who lost their lives at Mann Gulch on August 5, 1949.

The article was adapted from the Mann Gulch section of his book, in which he interviewed Bob Sallee, the last remaining survivor of the fire.

[48] Folk singer James Keelaghan wrote a song about this fire entitled "Cold Missouri Waters", released on his 1995 album A Recent Future.