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A crown fire approaches the Old Faithful photo shop and Snow Lodge during the Yellowstone fires of 1988. Within the park, 793,880 acres burned, set aflame by 42 lightning strikes and nine careless humans. PHOTO COURTESY NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

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First of two parts about the Yellowstone fires of 1988 – Eds.

On Aug. 20, 1988, Yellowstone National Park firefighter Michael Stuckey spent four hours in a nightmare of smoke and flame.

Atop a ridgeline northeast of the park’s East Gate, he was working with a chain saw crew in a remote section of backcountry when the fire lookout told him to return to the safety zone, a football-field-size clearing where workers were told to rendezvous if the Clover-Mist fire complex got out of control.

“We saw this really heavy black smoke, and it was coming from below,” said Stuckey from his office in Yellowstone, where he works as the east district interpreter. “The fire itself ... was coming directly at us. When the chain saws stopped and we took our earplugs out, there was a sound like several fright trains.”

“This was not one those ‘this could be kind of interesting’ moments,” Stuckey continued. “This was ‘hey, we’re in trouble.’”

Draws acted like chimneys, sucking the fire quickly up the mountain. At the safety zone, Stuckey and his crew frantically cleared more trees, increasing the buffer between firefighters and the fire.

Two helicopters roared up and down the mountainside bringing buckets of water to cool the perimeter, but the sound of rotor blades eventually faded into the smoke and did not return.

“We were told to stop working, pick a spot, sit down, and get our fire shelters out and get ready to deploy,” said Stuckey. “Some of us had to take our shelters and drop them over us in order to protect our fire-retardant clothing, because it was smoldering.”

The heat pushed the mercury in one firefighter’s thermometer up to 130 degrees, and the crew hunkered down to wait out the flames.

“The smoke was so thick I thought I was actually sweating smoke,” Stuckey recalled. “We could barely breathe. Embers falling everywhere. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t hear each other talk.”

At one point, the smoke lifted and Stuckey saw one of his comrades with his head between his legs.

“I tapped him on the shoulder, and I saw that he had tears in his eyes,” Stuckey recalled. “He had his family’s picture in his lap.”

Stuckey’s tale is one of thousands from a day dubbed “Black Saturday,” when high temperatures, low humidity and hurricane-force wind gusts doubled the size of the Yellowstone’s fires to 480,000 acres.

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A firefighter uses his helmit and a nearby pool to douse a smoking tree during the Mink Fire. Roughly 25,000 people were involved in fighting the 1988 Yellowstone blazes. NEWS&GUIDE FILE PHOTO / ANGUS M. THUERMER JR.

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The fires would continue until Sept. 11, when rain and snow finally quenched the 793,880 acres of charred earth set aflame by 42 lightning strikes and nine careless humans. The total firefighting effort cost $120 million and involved roughly 25,000 people. Around Greater Yellowstone, 1.5 million acres burned, 67 private and government buildings were destroyed and 12 others were badly damaged. One firefighter died in the Shoshone National Forest in October when he was struck by a falling tree.

The size and scope of the 1988 Yellowstone fires eclipsed, by several orders of magnitude, anything public land managers had witnessed since 1910, when the U.S. Forest Service battled roughly 3 million acres of wildfires in Idaho and Montana.

The blazes also started a dialogue that has arguably changed how public land managers deal with forest fires in the United States. The lessons learned from 1988 now influence almost every level of fire management policy, from interagency cooperation to safety, all in combination with new technology used to predict how forests will burn. Those policy changes also include an increased appreciation of fire’s essential role in rejuvenating the landscape.

Most experts argue that the fires were simply part of the park’s natural cycle, that the park’s decedent lodge pole pine forests were primed to burn. Experts also say that an aggressive policy of fire suppression from 1945 and 1971 could have exacerbated the fire potential by allowing fuels to accumulate across the landscape.

During the fire, critics of the National Park Service response – including members of Congress and some firefighters themselves – maintained that officials were reckless with its “let burn” natural fire policy. In a journal entry, a fire incident commander from the Shoshone National Forest said Yellowstone’s response created “a very difficult, frustrating situation.”

U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop from Wyoming said Park Service Director William Mott “spent his time defending his policy and not defending against the forest fires.” Critics continue to surface. In a recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune, one former Yellowstone firefighter recalled the effort as “mass confusion.”

Many fire personnel, however, not only consider the ’88 fires inevitable and impervious to human intervention, but also remember fighting the flames with a sense of pride. Joan Anzelmo, who worked as Yellowstone’s spokeswoman during blazes, said there never was a “let burn” policy during the summer of ’88. Such was the impression of the press and public that heard federal agencies tout the natural role and benefits of wildfire.

“Every fire in ‘88 was evaluated, but we were not nearly as sophisticated,” Anzelmo said in a telephone interview from Colorado National Monument. “We didn’t have the tools or the hint of understanding that there are certain scales of fire that are kind of epic events. That summer, Yellowstone was going to burn no matter how many firefighting resources we threw at the fire.”

Black Saturday “exemplified that,” she said. “There is no way man is going to put that fire out. You can’t stop an earthquake, you can’t stop a tornado, and you can’t stop fire on this scale.”

And the controversy went beyond the firefighting effort itself. Anzelmo says then-superintendent Bob Barbee worked hard to keep the park open so he wouldn’t risk bankrupting the surrounding communities that depended on Yellowstone visitors.

“Bob Barbee had to do quite a balancing act,” she said. Closing parts of the park was “going to cost the local economies huge amounts of money,” she said. “The National Park Service was trying to find some balance and to not overreact.”

In late July, as the North Fork Fire inched its way closer and closer to Old Faithful, Anzelmo said Barbee made the decision not to close the area, even though the incident commander “rather fiercely” insisted that he do so. “There was a lot of butting of heads,” she said. “It was an extremely challenging summer to say the least.”

In the end, Barbee was forced to close Old Faithful as the New Fork Fire made another run in early September. But, for all the confusion, the park remained open with only minimal damage to infrastructure, and no loss of life in Yellowstone.

Joe Krish, a veteran who has spent 26 years fighting fires for the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, agrees that the fires were likely inevitable.

“Operationally and tactically, I don’t know if we could have done anything different,” he said. “Maybe we could have pre-positioned more resources in the region or taken more aggressive prevention action. You don’t want to second guess those kinds of decisions.”

Until 1988, Krish said, the public expected fire officials to have nearly complete control over wildland fires. “We sold the public on our ability to fight fire,” he said.

As the Yellowstone fires spread, Krish said the hot weather, heavy fuel loads and high winds made the best predictive techniques at the time obsolete. What was predicted to burn in the course of two weeks was going up in smoke in three days.

Not only that, but firefighters in Yellowstone had historically relied on a pulse of wet weather – a monsoonal flow – in late July and early August that for 73 of the past 75 years had served to keep fires in check, according to Yellowstone spokesman Al Nash. Instead, they got “dry lightning,” storms that produced no rain but more fires.

“Firefighters were making decisions based on good historical weather data that said this wet weather was coming,” Nash said. “They were expecting nature to give us some help.”

Krish said determining fire behavior is much easier today, thanks to better understanding of weather patterns, as well as enhanced technologies such as advanced satellite imagery and computer models that take into account weather patterns, historical fires and fuel loading.

“We have some new tools available to us that probably allow us to do a little better job” of prediction, he said. “Certainly we’ve learned some things. But, we still have that goal of allowing fire to move across the landscape under its own power.”

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This aerial image taken one year after the blazes shows the fires' path as it marched toward the Old Faithful area. PHOTO COURTESY NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

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Technology aside, perhaps the most important change in fire policy is how agencies such as the Park Service and the Forest Service communicate and coordinate with one another. Fire managers now base decisions about whether to allow fires to burn on dozens of variables, especially the availability of firefighting resources nationwide. If firefighters, engines and helicopters are in short supply, the Forest Service might decide to squelch a 10th-acre fire burning in the Bridger Wilderness that might otherwise be allowed to burn to improve habitat.

While agencies did have some level of cooperation before 1988, now the system is much more formalized. Fire officials with the Park Service and the Forest Service now literally work from the same playbook, and the decision about whether to let a fire burn in Yellowstone might involve the park superintendent, district rangers, and the forest supervisor from the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

According to Krish, this type of coordination echoes what grunts on the ground already knew. “In policy, we’re at a regional and national scope to reinforce what folks on the ground had been doing operationally for years.”

In addition to better communications, the fire plans for each park have become more specific and detailed. For instance, Yellowstone National Park might manage a fire in the backcountry differently if the blaze might burn habitat for rare animals like moose or endangered species like the Canada lynx, both of which need specific forest types to survive.

“That all goes into the plan, in our decision making process,” said Krish. “It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t entertain having a ‘wildland fire use’ fire in the habitat. There are things that we can do to mitigate the impact to that habitat.”

A “wildland fire use” blaze is one of several new – or at least more common – phrases fire officials use to describe part of this new complex world of wild fires. A “wildland fire use” fire might be allowed to burn to benefit a stand of aspen trees after a lightning strike in the wilderness. A “fuels reduction” effort – pruning and thinning – might be used on the “wildland/urban interface” to protect homes on the edge of the forest.

Current fire policy also places a new emphasis on safety, according to Stuckey and Anzelmo. Anzelmo recalls driving around Yellowstone’s Grand Loop during Black Saturday and seeing tourists getting too close to the fire at West Thumb.

“There were visitors still kind of casually walking around,” she said. “I told them, ‘Hey, you guys, the fire is getting really close. You better move on down the road.’

“Today that scene wouldn’t have happened,” she said.“ That place would have been closed to the public.”

Stuckey said that today, firefighters likely wouldn’t find themselves in a remote backcountry situation like he did 20 years ago because there are no structures or lives to protect. Still, he credits his crew chiefs and his fellow firefighters for keeping him safe that day.

The crew chiefs never did order the firefighters to get in their fire shelters, even with the risk of a flashover, a condition where the fire might leap across the field to unburned trees on the other side, engulfing the firefighters in flame.

“They made a wise decision,” he said. “Instead of being one person isolated in a shelter, we at least saw each other. I think the reasoning was excellent. I gained courage just because I saw the people next to me.”

Later, when the blaze calmed down, Stuckey and his fellow firefighters got the order to pack up and head back to camp.

”The landscape was exactly like a Smokey Bear poster,” he said. “It looked bombed out. Our boots started smoking. Some people got blisters on their feet from the heat.”

“It was a very close call and we have a few reasons why we didn’t get really hurt that day: the courage of the crew and the courage of the leaders helped us to live to tell about it another day,” Stuckey said. “It was good training, a little bit of luck, and maybe overtime work on the part of some guardian angels.”