Yellowstone Continues to Grow Back From 1988 Fires

A quarter century after September snows extinguished the most widespread fires in Yellowstone National Park’s history, the regeneration of the park’s forests remains in its infancy.

The post-1988 forests are not recovered or more in balance, park ecologist Roy Rankin said. He doesn’t like to use anthropomorphic terms like good, bad, devastated or recovered. Fire is simply part of the natural cycle. And today, slowly in some places and quickly in others, the forests are growing back in.

“The forests are fine,” Rankin said. “They are still very young – they’re babies in the stand-regeneration process.

“That’ll continue for another 25 years, and then they’ll move into another phase,” he said.

The ’88 blazes elevated the discussion about fire policy and educated the public about wildfire’s role in fire-adapted ecosystems. The forests that the fires – the North Fork, Fan, Hell Roaring, Storm Creek, Clover-Mist, Red, Snake Complex, Mink and Huck – left behind are not just younger, but more of a mosaic.

Twenty-five years later, signs of the fires, which affected 36 percent of the 2.2-million-acre park, abound. Branchless blackened trunks tower over meadows and young groves of pine. Fallen trunks litter much of the park’s burnt areas.

The fire scars will persist for years, Rankin said.

“That pattern will be evident on the landscape for, oh jeez, for a long time,” he said. “We’re at a point now where somebody can look at it and really not know what they’re looking at, but that pattern will be evident for 200 years.”

The fires of ’88 caused little long-term damage to Yellowstone’s man-made infrastructure. They burned 67 buildings. Nobody died inside the park.

Rich Jehle, Yellowstone’s south district resource education ranger, was a cub park ranger at Madison in 1988 when the North Fork Fire closed in from three sides within an hour. He sat at the crossroads last month recalling when the largest blaze drove with a fury, pushed by strong winds.

“It was pretty crazy,” Jehle said. “All the burn area, all the regrowth in sight here was all (burned) that day.”

A tree cutter’s discarded cigarette started the North Fork Fire, which burned 400,000 acres.

Shade-intolerant and thin-barked, lodgepole pine, which are account for about 80 percent of all the tree cover in Yellowstone, are dependent on fire for regeneration. They can also burn furiously when dry.

With no measurable precipitation in July and August 1988, Yellowstone’s grasses and forest understory had a moisture content of 2 to 3 percent. Downed trees were 7 percent water, less than that of kiln-dried lumber.

At peak staffing levels in July, there were 9,000 firefighters combatting the fires of Yellowstone. The effort cost more than $120 million.

The crews cut 802 miles of lines to try to control the blazes, but they had little effect. Had Yellowstone let the fires burn themselves out, Jehle said, the burn scars would have been largely the same.

“The fires jumped every major road, every major river system,” Jehle said. “The only feature (the fires) didn’t jump in 1988 was Yellowstone Lake.”

The fires of ’88 made Rankin a believer in the role of fire in forest health, he said. Even the areas of Yellowstone that burned the hottest were quick to bounce back, the forest ecologist said.

Rankin used a swath of forest that blew down in 1984 between Norris and Canyon as an example. With timber on the ground, fire burned hot in the area.

“When the fires burned through this blow-down area, it left behind just ash,” Rankin said of the forest. “It looked like the bottom of your barbecue grill.”

Some experts at the time, Rankin said, believed that the soil was too scorched and devoid of nutrients to allow for any regrowth for decades if not centuries.

“But it’s coming back,” Rankin said, “so much so that you can’t even tell today that this area looked like the bottom of your barbecue 25 years ago.”

“Tree densities are not as great,” he said, “but you go in there and you look at the performance of the plant communities, and it’s like these things ate their Wheaties. Trees that are now only 25 years old are 18 to 20 feet tall.”

“We really didn’t know as much as we’d like to think to know about fire,” Rankin said.

Because of the fires of 1988, considered a once every 200- or 250-year event, it’s unlikely that Yellowstone will soon again burn on such a large scale.

“Fire is not random on the landscape,” Rankin said. “Old growth is very susceptible to it, and the opposite is true for young forest. And forests that are 200 years old can still be considered young.”

The forest’s relative immunity to fire, Rankin said, will be the imprint the ’88 fires will leave on Yellowstone that will outlast anyone living today.

“These fires of 1988 will leave a legacy on the landscape,” he said. “This legacy will be felt by future fires up until 200 years from now.”

The other legacy of 1988, Rankin said, will be how people perceive wildfire.

The 1988 Yellowstone fires were largely portrayed by the media as a devastating natural disaster. “Catastrophic,” “destroyed” and other incendiary words were commonly used to describe the flames that charred some 3,400 square miles in the ecosystem.

An education about fire’s natural role in Western forests, however, also came along with the press.

“We’ve got to learn how to live with fire,” Rankin said. “There was none of that talk 25 years ago.”