#MEN IN BLACK BLUE SCREEN TUNNEL WINDOWS#

While there are hundreds of underground fires in the Western United States, many are concentrated in the Powder River Basin, a lung-shaped swath of southeast Montana and northeast Wyoming. They devour the surface coal and burrow deep belowground where they continue to smolder, lasting anywhere from a few years to centuries Australia’s Mount Wingen has been burning underground for at least 6,000 years. They ignite on the surface, sparked by lightning or nearby wildfires, or through spontaneous combustion. But the fires were changing, becoming more common and more dangerous, and foretelling a new era of climate catastrophe in southeast Montana - an era in which devastating wildfires were no longer caused just by humans or lightning, but also by the fires below.ĬOAL SEAMS, glinting ribbons of flammable ore that unspool across every continent except Antarctica, have caught fire for millions of years.

Locals like the Baileys were familiar with these fires the area had long been nicknamed Coal Seam Alley. Once underground, these fires become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to extinguish. The moment the truck was swallowed, Bailey knew what had happened: They’d fallen into a sinkhole created by a burning coal seam, a type of fire that starts on natural outcrops of coal before quickly moving belowground, eating through seams that can range in thickness from a few inches to dozens of feet. The truck’s tires were smoking, and the rotten-egg smell of sulfur and ash poured out of tiny fissures surrounding the sinkhole.

#MEN IN BLACK BLUE SCREEN TUNNEL WINDOWS#

The two men rolled down their windows and scrambled out of the truck, crawling back up to soil that was hot to the touch. The truck had sunk into dry yellow grass, as though the ground they’d been driving on had eerily, and swiftly, deflated. Inside the pickup, shaken but unhurt, Bailey looked through a windshield at a world now split between earth and sky. Ghostly fumes rose up from the space where two men and the pickup had been just moments before. They were driving through a smoky gap - the fire line on their right, and a steep drainage, the Rough Draw, that dropped to a 60-foot-deep ravine to their left - when the ground beneath them suddenly disappeared.

Bailey drove slowly through the smoke from the fire, trading jokes with another cousin, Pat Bailey, who rode shotgun. The whole eroding country looked like it was settling, like someone sinking into the folds of a giant armchair. Black Angus roamed between them, the calves running on their tippy legs. Here in the high desert, generations of rivers - the Yellowstone, the Powder and the Tongue - had eaten into the soft sandstone, leaving a fortress of ochre and amber walls, webbed by steep escarpments and narrow drainages.

He didn’t own any fire gear, so he wore his regular ranching clothes: jeans and a Stetson that shaded his eyes as he looked across the valley below, where slabs of beige rock the size of three-story houses littered the landscape. The blaze was small, only a few acres, and Bailey, who had fought fires his entire life, wasn’t worried. The county’s official fire warden was stationed about an hour away, so Bailey, 53 at the time and Rosebud County’s volunteer fire chief, drove a state-owned pickup out to check on the fire line. The fire had started inconspicuously - no lightning strike or neglected campfire involved, just flames appearing on open range owned by Jared Broadus, Bailey’s cousin. On a hot, dry, windy summer morning in 2014, rancher John Bailey drove along the edge of a wildland fire in southeast Montana.

Men in black blue screen tunnel