A lo-fi picture taken by a firefighter on August 6, 2000, on a Kodak DC280 in Montana is considered to be one of the most famous wildfire photographs ever taken.
The photo taken by John McColgan — a fire behavior analyst — was picked by Time magazine as one of its Photographs of the Year and was printed in its The Year in Pictures 2000/2001 special edition.
The photo — entitled Elk Bath — shows a pair of cow elk standing in the Bitterroot River as McColgan stood on a bridge in the Bitterroot National Forest, west-central Montana.
Most recently, it was shared on Reddit where it received over 17,000 upvotes on the r/BeAmazed sub-Reddit. “I can’t help but think about the animals affected by wildfires. It’s heartbreaking,” writes one commenter.
The Story Behind the Shot
McColgan took the photo on a Kodak DC280 that comes with a two-megapixel CCD sensor. It was a new camera he’d bought and he described the shot as a “once-in-a-lifetime look.”
But initially, nobody knew the photo had been taken by McColgan. It had gone viral — which, in 2000, constituted being endlessly shared on email — but the facts of the photo had been lost along with the photographer’s name.
The public speculated that it had been taken on a firefighter’s disposable camera, or that it was taken during the 1988 Yellowstone National Park Fire, or perhaps it was a digital fake.
But an intrepid journalist named Rob Chaney of the Missoulian who called around information offices and ranger complexes managed to track down McColgan and confirm that he took the photo.
“I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I’ve been doing this for 20 years and it ranks in the top three days of fire behavior I’ve seen,” McColgan told Chaney back in 2000.
McColgan was being loaned out by the Alaska Fire Service to Montana so he could serve as an expert on wildlife behavior. He explained that the temperature in front of the flames was more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
Many on Reddit fretted about the animals in the photo but McColgan says they were fine and taking it all in their stride.
“They know where to go, where their safe zones are,” McColgan told the Missoulian. “A lot of wildlife did get driven down there to the river. There were some bighorn sheep there. A small deer was standing right underneath me, under the bridge.”
McColgan expressed his amazement that the photo was going viral over email. One wonders whether he knows it’s still going viral on the internet 24 years later.
“I couldn’t have profited from it, so I guess I’m glad so many people are enjoying it,” McColgan added.
Image credits: John McColgan, Bureau of Land Management, Alaska Fire Service.