The memories are 20 years old now, but if I close my eyes, I can still smell the smoke. All summer long that year, clouds of smoke roiled over Yellowstone National Park.
That was in 1988, when I was Yellowstone’s spokesperson and the park was on fire. It was my job to explain to reporters what was happening.
Many times that summer, there seemed to be no words to describe the devastation.
When it was over, nearly one-third of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres had burned. Even though the park’s ecosystem was shaped by the very forces of nature that created those historic fires in 1988, the public had a hard time accepting the fact that its favorite national park was burning up and we couldn’t do a darned thing to put the fires out.
No national park had ever sustained wildfires of that magnitude before.
The 1988 Yellowstone fire was the largest firefighting effort in the United States up to that time, with $120 million spent fighting the fires and some 25,000 people involved in the efforts. Miraculously, despite the legions of firefighters on the ground and the array of helicopters and aircraft flying every day, no one died as a result of the fires in Yellowstone.
Since 1988, the country has experienced increasingly bigger and more dangerous fire seasons, and with much more devastating results than those that year in Yellowstone. Yet the Yellowstone fires remain unique not only for their ferocity but also because they drew worldwide attention. Yellowstone received unprecedented media focus.
The weather that spring of ’88 seemed normal, as I recall. We had plenty of precipitation, even snowfall in early June. There were unusual winds in April and May, and they proved to be the harbinger of the gale-force winds that we endured later that summer. These winds drove the fires across Yellowstone’s vast landscape. The fires jumped rivers, canyons and roads, thwarting the heroic efforts of hundreds of firefighters.
As June progressed, a few lightning strikes ignited some fires. These fires were monitored and allowed to burn within the parameters of Yellowstone’s existing fire-management policy. In our agency lingo, these fires were known as “prescribed natural fires.” But because the term was awkward, the more common vernacular to describe them was “let-burn fires.”
If only we could have known how damaging those words would become, they would have been stricken from our vocabulary. That casual description, “let-burn fires” led the public to believe that the National Park Service was simply letting Yellowstone burn and not trying to fight the fires.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Let me set the record straight: There was no “let-burn policy” in Yellowstone that year. Some fires that were ignited by lightning — the ones in remote locations that met the fire policy — were monitored but initially allowed to burn. But by July 21, all fires, no matter where they ignited, were actively being fought because the conditions had become so extreme.
In fact, the largest fire, the North Fork Fire, was aggressively fought from the day it began on July 22, but it grew to over 400,000 acres. It caused evacuations of all of the park’s developed areas at one time or another, closed roads, threatened many structures, and almost burned down the historic Old Faithful Inn.
The summer of 1988 in Yellowstone changed everything for the agencies charged with fire management, for the news media who cover wildland fires and for anyone who follows the news and management of wildland fires. The Yellowstone fires that year became the catalyst that triggered significant evolution in the field of fire science, fire policy, and present-day fire management.
Today’s highly structured federal fire-management policy essentially directs fire managers to use appropriate response to any lightning-caused fire. This means fires are evaluated, carefully monitored and allowed to burn if they pose no risk to people, property or other important values. Today’s policy has more layers of planning, analysis, management options and more specific firefighter-safety requirements than were in existence in 1988.
Fire is now more widely recognized as an essential component for healthy forested landscapes.
Some 20 years later, is it clear that Yellowstone National Park was going to burn that summer in an epic way no matter what. The Yellowstone fires of 1988 taught us that man cannot stop fire on that scale — even with the best of efforts.
Joan Anzelmo is the superintendent of Colorado National Monument.
