Alaska Moves to Keep One of the World's Last Fire Outposts

In a roadless stretch of Southwest Alaska the size of a small country, a single air-only outpost stands between summer lightning and the villages scattered along the rivers. The state wants to keep it there.

The Alaska Division of Forestry and Fire Protection is seeking a five-year extension on its lease for the McGrath Fire Base, the forward outpost from which it runs aviation-based firefighting across the region. Because there's no road in or out, McGrath fights fire the only way it can — by air, launching helicopters and air tankers straight to the smoke. Forestry's own description of the base is striking: one of the last forward-operating wildland firefighting bases in the world.

The ground it covers is enormous. From McGrath, crews protect roughly 66.6 million acres of Southwest Alaska — terrain running from mountainous uplands to lowland flats, dotted with river villages, reachable only by air. When fire season hits, the base's job is to catch new starts fast and keep them away from communities like Red Devil and Nikolai. It does that on a lean operation: ten permanent seasonal positions were cut in 2015 to save money, leaving a crew built largely from temporary emergency firefighters who, as the base's longtime manager once put it, "make it work."

That history is exactly why the lease matters more than routine property paperwork. Funding and staffing at McGrath have been fought over before — after the 2015 cuts, a local resident pressed legislators to restore the base's capacity, arguing the region remained dangerously exposed to fire. Locking in the base's footprint for another five years keeps the outpost, and the air attack it launches, in place for the communities that have no other line of defense.