A Fire Runs Through It
posted by Scott Herring @ 12:31 AM
When last we spoke, I described our trip to Yellowstone last summer. I'd like to go further back in time now. After a years-long gap in our relationship--and it is a relationship--I first returned to the park in 2003, worried about what I would find. My worry was a pretty big and expansive thing. I want to talk here about one aspect of that worry, my fear that I would find the park in flames.
Not that I was concerned about fire damage; anyone who lived in Yellowstone during the 1990s learned not to notice the marks of passage left by wildfire, and even learned to be skeptical about Smokey Bear and his relentless pleading. As you may know, the park burned fiercely in the summer of 1988. Huge, uncontrollable fires raked forest and meadow and everything else from one end of the park to the other; pushed by the prevailing winds from southwest to northeast, they burned all summer long and left about half the park scorched. From above--way above, from a satellite--they left the landscape striped like the back of a tiger. I first arrived not too long after the last of the fires finally sputtered out. All around my first location, Old Faithful, the woods were deep black. Even the earth was still sterile in places, and the smell of combustion lay over all. We got to a point at which we scarcely noticed.
During that first trip back, in 2003, we drove north on Interstate 15--myself, Jen, and Dustin, then only five, young enough that he spent the whole trip to the park in a car seat, strapped in like a Mercury astronaut. I was anxiously scanning for changes. Happily, I kept my wits about me at least a little. The landscape was immediately different from my memories, but I was of course comparing it to my annual drive north in May, and here we were in the second half of a dry summer. Every landmark was right where I remembered it, and oddly just as I remembered it. One later-summer difference was ominous, though: the brown haze on the horizon as we crossed the mountains into Idaho, a haze that got thicker until it was one continuous brown cloud that blotted out the horizon, and anything else more than a mile distant. Fires, just about everywhere; as in the mid-nineties, the last time I had seen it, the whole Northern Rockies was having a drought.
We stopped in Idaho Falls when the Golden Arches appeared (they had been oddly sparse, for some miles. Not too many changes, really). Those Golden Arches were indistinct in the smoke. We got Dustin a Happy Meal and let him crash around on the Playplace-thing. Jen fueled the car while I ate my own meal, queasy with interstate seasickness and foreboding. Where was the nearest fire, the one producing smoke so thick that it now hurt our eyes? Was the park on fire? I knew that one large fire and many small ones were burning in Yellowstone; was that where this smoke was coming from? According to the newspapers, a large fire was burning ten miles west of Rexburg. But, as we entered the last stretch of our journey, the smoke reached a climax, and then began to thin, to be replaced by another, familiar atmospheric phenomenon: a cold front that spit occasional rain.
"When are we gonna get there?" Dustin asked.
"Six hours," Jen responded. It was actually more like forty-five minutes, now. I suspect she just didn't feel like calculating. For the rest of the week, whenever Dustin asked when we were gonna get there, I responded "Six grueling hours," even if our destination was five minutes away.
At that magic point on which the Rockies begin, just beyond Ashton, Idaho, we drove into the forest and the mountains, and on to West Yellowstone. We made that last turn, and drove past the sign: "Yellowstone National Park." Like a tourist, I got in line behind a commercial van, then had to back up and get in another line. A volunteer handed us our bundle of maps and newsletters, and that very same yellow "DO NOT APPROACH BUFFALO" flyer, the one with a drawing of a bison the size of a triceratops, throwing a humanoid in the air like a rag doll. A copy of this flyer hung in the bunkhouse I lived in long ago, pinned to the wall with a roofing nail. Such was our interior decor.
For the first time in years--and how did that happen?--I drove into Yellowstone National Park.
No big changes in that long straightaway just after the entrance--and the sky was still relatively clear of smoke--but then we came to the first 1988 burn, the one that marched across the Madison valley. Here was an astonishing change.
But astonishing only to me, and I was operating under highly unusual--and ultimately delightful--circumstances. I only later understood the precise nature of those circumstances. I first saw Yellowstone just nineteen months after the last of the 1988 fires died in the autumn snow. From then until I left, when we saw a burned forest, we normally could not see the extent of the burn, and sometimes could not even tell that the fires had been here. This illusion was created by the needles, the branches, and the bark on the dead trees. The needles, although rust-colored, often had not fallen off yet; neither had the branches or bark, even though--as we discovered every time we went hiking--they were black with soot and quite dead. A conifer was an even sturdier thing than we entirely understood. The forests were dead, but wouldn't lie down.
That is the essence of the change. Not just the needles have fallen; so have the branches, and many of the trees themselves. In places where the wind is intense, most of the forest has fallen. The bark is gone, too, so those trees still standing are now bleached white spires, bent, abused, and unstable scale-model versions of the Washington Monument. Where the slopes are steep and the fires burned hottest, the dead trees are pretty much all down. In their place are bright green lawns of lodgepole pines, in places four feet tall, in places over my head, but everywhere dense and everywhere that same bright shade of green. Along some ridgelines, two burned swaths are separated by unburned forest. That unburned forest--often strikingly narrow and straight--now provides its ridgeline a Mohawk haircut.
Whenever I came upon a burned area, all week, I became Rip Van Winkle, without the negative consequences.
We stopped at Seven Mile Bridge, to fulfill, quite easily, the first of a number of ambitions: a nesting trumpeter swan was at rest a hundred yards upstream. Jen and Dustin had never been here, and had never seen such a thing. The Madison was full of rising trout, and full of water, as was every other river and stream and lake in the park. I had thought we might have a problem with water, in this year of drought, but few of the problems I anticipated ever came up. Yellowstone unfolded itself with ease and openness, the same it has shown me from the start.
It's a crazy place. You leave it for years, and come back expecting to be disappointed, only to find that it's better than it was.
Not that I was concerned about fire damage; anyone who lived in Yellowstone during the 1990s learned not to notice the marks of passage left by wildfire, and even learned to be skeptical about Smokey Bear and his relentless pleading. As you may know, the park burned fiercely in the summer of 1988. Huge, uncontrollable fires raked forest and meadow and everything else from one end of the park to the other; pushed by the prevailing winds from southwest to northeast, they burned all summer long and left about half the park scorched. From above--way above, from a satellite--they left the landscape striped like the back of a tiger. I first arrived not too long after the last of the fires finally sputtered out. All around my first location, Old Faithful, the woods were deep black. Even the earth was still sterile in places, and the smell of combustion lay over all. We got to a point at which we scarcely noticed.
During that first trip back, in 2003, we drove north on Interstate 15--myself, Jen, and Dustin, then only five, young enough that he spent the whole trip to the park in a car seat, strapped in like a Mercury astronaut. I was anxiously scanning for changes. Happily, I kept my wits about me at least a little. The landscape was immediately different from my memories, but I was of course comparing it to my annual drive north in May, and here we were in the second half of a dry summer. Every landmark was right where I remembered it, and oddly just as I remembered it. One later-summer difference was ominous, though: the brown haze on the horizon as we crossed the mountains into Idaho, a haze that got thicker until it was one continuous brown cloud that blotted out the horizon, and anything else more than a mile distant. Fires, just about everywhere; as in the mid-nineties, the last time I had seen it, the whole Northern Rockies was having a drought.
We stopped in Idaho Falls when the Golden Arches appeared (they had been oddly sparse, for some miles. Not too many changes, really). Those Golden Arches were indistinct in the smoke. We got Dustin a Happy Meal and let him crash around on the Playplace-thing. Jen fueled the car while I ate my own meal, queasy with interstate seasickness and foreboding. Where was the nearest fire, the one producing smoke so thick that it now hurt our eyes? Was the park on fire? I knew that one large fire and many small ones were burning in Yellowstone; was that where this smoke was coming from? According to the newspapers, a large fire was burning ten miles west of Rexburg. But, as we entered the last stretch of our journey, the smoke reached a climax, and then began to thin, to be replaced by another, familiar atmospheric phenomenon: a cold front that spit occasional rain.
"When are we gonna get there?" Dustin asked.
"Six hours," Jen responded. It was actually more like forty-five minutes, now. I suspect she just didn't feel like calculating. For the rest of the week, whenever Dustin asked when we were gonna get there, I responded "Six grueling hours," even if our destination was five minutes away.
At that magic point on which the Rockies begin, just beyond Ashton, Idaho, we drove into the forest and the mountains, and on to West Yellowstone. We made that last turn, and drove past the sign: "Yellowstone National Park." Like a tourist, I got in line behind a commercial van, then had to back up and get in another line. A volunteer handed us our bundle of maps and newsletters, and that very same yellow "DO NOT APPROACH BUFFALO" flyer, the one with a drawing of a bison the size of a triceratops, throwing a humanoid in the air like a rag doll. A copy of this flyer hung in the bunkhouse I lived in long ago, pinned to the wall with a roofing nail. Such was our interior decor.
For the first time in years--and how did that happen?--I drove into Yellowstone National Park.
No big changes in that long straightaway just after the entrance--and the sky was still relatively clear of smoke--but then we came to the first 1988 burn, the one that marched across the Madison valley. Here was an astonishing change.
But astonishing only to me, and I was operating under highly unusual--and ultimately delightful--circumstances. I only later understood the precise nature of those circumstances. I first saw Yellowstone just nineteen months after the last of the 1988 fires died in the autumn snow. From then until I left, when we saw a burned forest, we normally could not see the extent of the burn, and sometimes could not even tell that the fires had been here. This illusion was created by the needles, the branches, and the bark on the dead trees. The needles, although rust-colored, often had not fallen off yet; neither had the branches or bark, even though--as we discovered every time we went hiking--they were black with soot and quite dead. A conifer was an even sturdier thing than we entirely understood. The forests were dead, but wouldn't lie down.
That is the essence of the change. Not just the needles have fallen; so have the branches, and many of the trees themselves. In places where the wind is intense, most of the forest has fallen. The bark is gone, too, so those trees still standing are now bleached white spires, bent, abused, and unstable scale-model versions of the Washington Monument. Where the slopes are steep and the fires burned hottest, the dead trees are pretty much all down. In their place are bright green lawns of lodgepole pines, in places four feet tall, in places over my head, but everywhere dense and everywhere that same bright shade of green. Along some ridgelines, two burned swaths are separated by unburned forest. That unburned forest--often strikingly narrow and straight--now provides its ridgeline a Mohawk haircut.
Whenever I came upon a burned area, all week, I became Rip Van Winkle, without the negative consequences.
We stopped at Seven Mile Bridge, to fulfill, quite easily, the first of a number of ambitions: a nesting trumpeter swan was at rest a hundred yards upstream. Jen and Dustin had never been here, and had never seen such a thing. The Madison was full of rising trout, and full of water, as was every other river and stream and lake in the park. I had thought we might have a problem with water, in this year of drought, but few of the problems I anticipated ever came up. Yellowstone unfolded itself with ease and openness, the same it has shown me from the start.
It's a crazy place. You leave it for years, and come back expecting to be disappointed, only to find that it's better than it was.
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