``Things are going well,'' fire analyst Dave Whitmer said. ``But everything is lined up against us.''
Firefighters have been burning dry trees and grasses in the wildfire's path for three days. The successful backfires have created a precarious seven-mile long barrier between the advancing fire and the town, removing fuel from in front of the main blaze. Firefighters planned more backfires Friday.
Authorities said homecomings might just be a day or two away, but some of the roughly 500 evacuated residents jumped the gun Thursday. That prompted Flathead County officials to again ask them to leave.
``More and more people are filtering back in all the time,'' said Undersheriff Chuck Curry. ``That is somewhat distressing for us, because we could end up evacuating the same people over and over again.''
Curry said they no longer have a reliable estimate of how many people are in West Glacier. ``We are beginning to tell people, `You are not going to get any warning next time,''' he said.
The wildfire already has burned about 20,500 acres, and fire conditions are extreme: record dry timber, erratic winds and temperatures above 100.
So far, the protection efforts around West Glacier have been the focus of a 900-member firefighting team.
Another fire on the extreme northwestern edge of the park has burned more than 22,000 acres and was moving toward the Canadian border just six miles away. It has burned 29 buildings, including six homes, and still threatens about 100 homes and cabins near the North Fork of the Flathead River. Another fire inside the park has burned about 19,000 acres on Flattop Mountain
The National Interagency Fire Center reported Thursday that 41 large fires were burning in the West. Fires this season have charred some 1.8 million acres so far, compared to an average of 2.3 million acres as of the end of July.
A wildfire in Idaho that claimed the lives of two firefighters last week was expected to be totally controlled by the weekend, fire information spokesman Tim Buxton said.
Jeff Allen, 24, and Shane Heath, 22 were overrun by flames after they rappelled to the ground from a helicopter in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. That fire burned 5,614 acres and cost $3.1 million dollars to fight.
In Washington state, a lightening-sparked wildfire that has blackened 74,368 acres since June 29 continued to burn slowly up the Spanish Creek drainage toward Canada. It is still just 35 percent contained.
Conditions are so dry in Eastern Washington that officials in the Colville National Forest considered closing the forest to all public access.
