Fire! We wake up in our nice, clean beds and greet the rising sun. The air is blue, mostly, but there is a thin smoky pall over everything – there must be a fire out there somewhere. We didn't know about it then, but the Magpie fire was burning through several thousand acres in the central plateau. Presumably the winds had pushed the smoke away from the Firehole basin. Also, about six other fires are burning somewhere or other within the park boundaries. Today, we were getting it from fires both within and without the park.

After a fine breakfast in the big white dining room, we filled the car with outrageously expensive gasoline and headed to the hot springs. Mammoth Hot Springs emerge from a long, sloping hillside. As with most of the hot springs and geysers in the park, minerals precipitate out of the water as it cools, and form thick terraces. Unlike, say, Grand Prismatic Pool, only small areas of Mammoth are active at present, and those areas that aren't have started to crumble away. I must say I was a teeny bit disappointed at the overall lack of hot springiness on display here.

At the top of this big pile, some active springs are slowly engulfing additional land, making life unpleasant for the local trees.

A few of the springs are active enough to produce the usual large pools of scalding hot water.

Here's the largest one currently, which overflows from the top of the whole set of terraces. The view off to the northeast shows ridges fading into the haze and the army of skeleton trees marching downslope.

Speaking of fire: our trip coincided with the 18th anniversary of the 1988 fire season, The Yellowstone Fires, when it seemed like (or at least media reports made it seem like) the whole park would go up in flames. About a third of the total park acreage did go up in flames, along with 400,000 acres outside the park.

The scope of the destruction roused public officials and media into one of their favorite pastimes, searching for scapegoats. The Park Service's "Natural Burn" fire policy – and the managers who pursued it – were the primary targets.

The Park Service adopted the new policy in the early '70's. Contra the old Smokey the Bear prevent-forest-fires-at-all-costs policy, it stipulated that naturally-caused fires, as long as they didn't threaten people, property, or look like they were going to burn past the park boundaries, should be left to burn themselves out. The policy resulted from the realization that western forests evolved in dry, fire-prone climates; supressing fire reduces the sprouting of young trees, and allows the buildup of dangerous amounts of highly flammable debris. By the '60's, western forest managers realized that they were effectively sitting on a time bomb, and the park service adopted the "natural burn" policy as a way of trying to slowly defuse that bomb.

Anyway, back to the search for scapegoats:

Two Wyoming senators demanded that National Park Superintendent William Mott be fired. Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel told Good Morning America on July 23, 1988, "We're not going to let Yellowstone be damaged by this." The news media was one of the worst critics... The Billings Gazette questioned why Yellowstone Park Superintendent Robert Barbee "rode a dead policy into hell." The Richmond News Leader wrote, "If you want to see the world's largest charcoal grill, just visit Yellowstone. Be sure to say, 'Thank you, environmentalists!'" The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Yellowstone Burns as Park Managers Play Politics."

As a result of such vociferous and ill-informed criticism, the Park Service suspended its natural burn policy throughout the west in 1989, though there was never any evidence that the policy was incorrect, or implemented incorrectly, or even that vigorous fire suppression in 1988 would have made any difference in the severity of the Yellowstone fires. (It reintroduced the policy in the early '90's.)

I worked with a number of fire ecologists at the time. It was pretty clear to us that the park would, in general, bounce back relatively quickly after the fires, but we were still surprised by just how rapidly regeneration took place.

The park's a pretty green place nowadays, but the effects of the fires are still very evident if you know what to look for – the many dead tree trunks in the background at Old Faithful or the Grand Prismatic Spring, for instance. In this satellite view of the park, the areas burned in 1988 are still easily seen as the orange-toned areas (compare to this map).

[All trip entries]

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Posted by David Fleck at 01 May 2007 08:04 PM