When Elizabeth Bilton received a call from her son last week telling her that “everything is OK,” she immediately knew it wasn’t. Her son, Justin, and husband, Charles, were safe — that much was true. But her motherly instincts were right: The camping trip the pair had been on in the backwoods of Montana almost took a deadly turn. On Aug. 12, Justin and his father became temporarily trapped in their car along a winding road in Glacier National Park, after a wildfire that started on the ridgeline not far from their campsite quickly spread, burning acres of trees and creating a wall of flames and smoke that surrounded them on all sides. Advertisement “I have never seen anything like it,” Justin, 37, said in a telephone interview Monday. “It was just like looking at a war zone — like a nuclear bomb had gone off.” The Boston resident was on the last leg of a two-week vacation with his 70-year-old father when they found themselves caught in the harrowing situation, hoping to make it out of the fiery woods alive. Justin and Charles had driven down a dead-end road on Sunday to get to a trailhead that would take them to a campsite roughly two miles into the wilderness. A fire burns next to Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park in northwest Montana on Aug. 12. CHRIS PETERSON/HUNGRY HORSE NEWS VIA AP, FILE A “small fire, by Montana standards” had started on Howe Ridge, near the lake, the day prior, he said. At first, both father and son were unfazed by the smoke billowing in the distance. They even talked to some fire crews in the area who told them the fire was unlikely to spread. “It didn’t look like it was growing at all,” Justin said. Justin Bilton (left) and father Charlie. Justin Bilton But the winds picked up Sunday evening, shortly after they made camp, and things intensified. Suddenly, Justin said, the fire “exploded.” Advertisement “It grew . . . in a couple of hours,” he said. “I told my dad, ‘I think we need to get out of here before it gets any worse.’ ” The pair gathered their gear and headed through the woods toward their rental car, which they planned to drive back along Lake McDonald Road — the way they came in — to safety. “Everything looked fine for the most part,” Justin said of the start of their drive. “We thought, ‘We can get out of here.’ ” Initially, there was some “fire near the road,” he said. But after they took a few more turns, the situation deteriorated. “It was an inferno. It was just walls of flames on both sides of the car,” he said. “The car started getting hot really fast. It felt like it was a 100-degree day, and your car had been sitting in the parking lot all day.” A video taken from inside the car as Justin and his father tried to escape the inferno shows embers flying toward the windshield like a swarm of bugs on a highway. To the right and left of the vehicle, limbless and charred trees were glowing through the smoky forest air. Flames lined the dirt road and seemed to reach up toward the car like orange snakes, making a slight hissing sound. In the video, which has gone viral, a worried and shocked Justin can be heard praying that they make it out alive, as his father tries to calm him down, repeatedly telling him “you’re doing good, you’re doing good.” Advertisement That’s when things went from bad to worse: a tree ravaged by the intense fire had fallen down across the road, blocking their escape route. “I saw that and I thought we were going to die,” Justin said. “I thought we were trapped, there was no way we could turn around on the road.” With his father’s guidance, Justin kicked the car into reverse and drove the vehicle all the way back to the trailhead at the end of the road. At times, Justin said, he was going as fast as 40 miles per hour. “It was absolutely insane, I don’t know how I was able to keep the car on the road,” he said. “But somehow — a few prayers and a Higher Power — we stayed on the road.” Once they were back at the trailhead, which was safe from the fire for the time being, they walked down toward a nearby cabin to see if anyone could help them. That’s when they saw a small boat floating on Lake McDonald, with two people on board. “We flagged them down and they came over and grabbed us, and we got onto the boat,” said Justin. “Ten minutes later, we were on the water and we saw the whole part of the lake shore where we had been standing just go up in flames.” By Tuesday, Justin and his father were headed home to Boston, with little more than the clothes they had been wearing when they escaped the blaze two days prior. Advertisement Looking back, Justin said he’s grateful that a series of fortunate events — and the help of strangers — got him and his father out of the life-threatening scenario. “There are so many ‘what ifs,’ and things that seem too unlikely to be coincidental,” he said. “If another tree had fallen behind us while trying to reverse, we would have been dead. And if [those people] weren’t there in the boat, we would have been dead. That’s the most amazing thing to me.” Justin Bilton looked out at the wildfire from the safety of a boat. Justin Bilton Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.<doc-sep>The pair was trying to escape the Howe Ridge Fire in Glacier National Park. A father and son made a mad dash "through hell" in the middle of a blazing forest fire while driving down a winding mountain road in Glacier National Park in Montana -- and have it all caught on a harrowing video. The pair emerged with their lives, but not the car -- they ended up abandoning it to the flames. The video was filmed in West Glacier, Montana, where the Howe Ridge Fire has already scorched over 4,000 acres since it started on Aug. 11. Evacuations were in effect in the Lake Macdonald area, where Justin Bilton and his 70-year-old father were forced to flee. "My 70-year-old dad and I were stuck at a trailhead at the end of a dead-end road near Lake Macdonald in West Glacier, MT," Bilton wrote on YouTube in sharing the video. "The wildifre (sic) was between us and the only way out. After we reached the downed, burning tree seen at the end of the video, I had to reverse all the way back to the trailhead, where we were lucky to flag down a boat." Bilton said he and his father were rescued by two park rangers after abandoning their vehicle. In the video you can hear Bilton repeatedly worry they aren't going to make it out with their lives, asking, "What if the car blows up?" and eventually saying, "Dad this is insane," at one point. Of course, like any father riding with his son, raging wildfire or not, he warns Justin "easy, easy" and "slow down." The Howe Ridge Fire was started by a lightning strike and had burned 4,138 acres as of Saturday night, according to the National Park Service. West Glacier is in extreme northwest Montana, about 140 miles north of Missoula and only about 40 miles from the Canadian border -- if you're walking. ABC News' Abigail Shalawylo contributed to this report.<doc-sep>This video is no longer available. We apologize for the inconvenience. This video is no longer available (CNN) — Justin Bilton and his father sized up the wildfire raging ahead of their car and, thinking their window to escape was closing, decided to race through it. “Dad, what if the car blows up?” Justin, the driver, asks his father, Charles, sitting beside him. “(Then) we’re dead,” Charles answers. “Just keep driving.” A two-minute video shot by Justin shows their harrowing drive along a narrow dirt road as Glacier National Park burned around them, why it didn’t work, and how they survived. ’Dad, this is insane’ The Massachusetts father, 70, and his son, 37, were camping in the Montana park earlier this month when the Howe Ridge Fire closed in on them. Justin, recalling their escape to CNN’s “New Day” on Tuesday, said they thought the blaze was far enough away that they could drive out in their rental car. He started to record a video, looking ahead through the windshield, as they got underway. Storyful Justin Bilton recorded the fire roaring just outside his car as he drove. But as they got around a few bends, they saw the crackling fire was much closer. Lush vegetation suddenly gave way to roaring flames and a yellow-pink haze. “Dad, this is insane,” Justin says after they decide to push forward. “I know. We don’t want to be trapped in here,” Charles responds calmly. They turn away from the flames, and it looks like they’re out of danger. But when they continue around another bend, an inferno awaits. Everything around the road is a roaring glow of yellow and reddish orange. Roadside trees are burning and scorched debris flicks off the windshield. The heat was getting unbearable. More than once, Justin resists his father’s call to drive slowly and carefully. “Dad, the car is heating up. It’s going to explode,” Justin says. “We’re alright,” Charles responds, sounding surprisingly calm. “Jesus, God, help us,” the son says. A blocked road Less than two minutes into the video, they come to a downed tree, burning in the road in front of them. It’s blocking the road. They can’t go forward. “Oh (expletive)! Dad, we can’t get out!” Justin says. Calm as ever, Charles announces he’s getting out of the car. “We get that out of the road. We get gloves,” he says. By now, Justin has put the camera down, and the video goes black. How they got out Charles, it turned out, did not remove the tree. Instead, Justin put the car in reverse and they drove back the way they came. “I was shocked how fast he backed that up, and how steady,” Charles told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota, recalling the episode days later. “We were on an 8-foot-wide dirt road with a lot of ruts. And it was hard to see because of the flames and because of the intensity. “And he did an amazing job. He backed it up. We were able to turn it around, and he drove out of it.” But that just put them back to the trailhead. They were still trapped by the fire. They pair abandoned their car and looked for another way out. At nearby Lake McDonald, they saw two park workers with a motorboat, watching the fire, Charles said. “We kept yelling and waving, and they just waved back at us like we were saying hi,” he said. “And … we’re going, ‘No, come here, come here, we need help.’” The workers picked up the pair and escorted them back to their campsite, where they packed up. Then the workers ferried them to safety on the other side of the lake, Charles said. “They saved their lives,” Charles said. The Howe Ridge Fire, ignited by a lightning strike on August 11, has scorched more than 11,000 acres in Glacier National Park. Looking back on it, Justin says he’s surprised they were able to back out of the inferno when they found the road blocked. “Once we saw that downed tree, I really didn’t think we were going to be able to get out of there alive,” he said.<doc-sep>
Justin Bilton and his 70-year-old father narrowly escaped the fast-moving flames at Glacier National Park after a lightning strike started theblaze Justin Bilton and his 70-year-old father were finishing up a trip through Wyoming and Montana earlier this month when they set up came in Glacier National Park. But the father-son duo had no idea that their vacation would turn into a fight for their lives. The day after setting up camp, Bilton and his father realized that a lightning strike had started a small fire, which eventually grew into a massive more than 7,500-acre blaze dubbed Howe Ridge Fire, according to KULR. With that, the pair jumped into their rental car and attempted to drive to safety. “I just had a bad feeling about it, and I was like ‘Dad, I think we need to get out of here,’ ” Bilton told WHDH of the moments he and his father first spotted the small blaze. Soon, they were shocked by how much the fire had grown. “It was just like a firestorm. There’s like embers blowing. There’s trees completely on fire,” Bilton continued to the station. Footage of the incident shows the forest in flames as Bilton and his father made their way through the forest’s winding roads in a panic. “Oh my God. Dad, the car is heating up. It’s gonna explode,” Bilton is heard saying in the video. “Jesus. God, help us. Dad, what if a tree falls on us. Dad, we can’t get out!” Bilton told ABC News that the car’s headlights failed and he couldn’t see anything out of the back window. Still, he was able to drive in reverse, back the way they came. They drove as far as they could through the flames until they reached a nearby lake, KRTV reports. There, they waved down two people with a small boat, and were rescued, according to the station. Bilton wrote about the incident in a now-deleted Facebook post, according to KRTV, noting that the car burned in the fire.