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The second part of a two-part series about the Yellowstone fires of 1988 – Eds.

Just south of Mammoth Hot Springs, Tom Olliff stands in a field of sagebrush and lupine on the border of a stand of juvenile lodgepole pine.

The charred remains of trees protrude above their sapling offspring. Burnt logs form a cross hash on the ground.

It’s been 20 years since the North Fork Fire complex roared up past Mount Holmes over Winter Creek and Indian Creek to this stand of trees just off the road from Norris to Mammoth in Yellowstone National Park. After more than 700,000 acres of the park burned in the summer of 1988, this immature forest is now a predominate part of Yellowstone’s landscape.

“The Yellowstone I knew – I’ll never see that again,” said Olliff, who started working in the world’s first national park in 1977 as a backcountry ranger and a firefighter and who now serves as chief of the Yellowstone Center for Resources. “From the human perspective, it’s really changed, from beautiful old forest to scraggly pine. We’re going to be looking at this for my lifetime.

“If you don’t really think about the underlying ecology of it and think about just what it looks like, it is a disaster,” Olliff continues.

Even as the national media declared Yellowstone destroyed in late September, grass was already beginning to emerge from the ashes near Grant Village. And, the following spring, the park’s plants staged a resurgence on a landscape scale.

The fact is, the underlying ecology of Yellowstone is absolutely dependent upon fire and now, 20 years later, science shows that all but a handful of species have benefited from the conflagration 20 years ago. This ecological revolution came despite the doomsday prophecies of the day’s talking heads.

One of those naysayers, Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel, dubbed the fires “devastating” and asked the park to begin reforestation efforts along roadsides.

But the tone of Yellow-stone’s employees, especially the scientists, was optimistic. Yellowstone’s chief of research John Varley called the fires the “ecological event of the century.”

“There’s no ecological bad news here,” he said in an interview with the Jackson Hole News published in September 1988. “In fact, it’s very exciting. The only negative here is what it is doing to certain human attitudes.”

The public’s negative perception of wildfire was largely shaped by not only media, but also the Smokey Bear advertisements that started in the mid-1940s, according to Joan Anzelmo, park spokeswoman during the ’88 fires. The fictional character, which became the longest running public service campaign in U.S. history, reinforced ideas that forest fires caused harm to the environment.

“Visitors at large assumed that fires would cause everything to die: the trees, the plants, the animals,” said Anzelmo, who now works as superintendent of Colorado National Monument. “The whole place was burning up and there wasn’t going to be anything left. It was the mentality of ‘fire is bad.’”

Promoting wildfires

Early in the summer, Anzelmo said the park worked to emphasize the importance of wildfire to the ecosystem.

“Even as things began to heat up, the scientists and the resource managers in the park were saying, ‘This is an important story. Be sure you get this right. Be talking about the ecological benefits,’” Anzelmo said.

But, as the fires grew and the suppression effort intensified, the message switched to firefighters, helicopters and threatened structures. The shift was, in part, to debunk the misconception that officials were content to let Yellowstone burn.

“We went from a more traditional ecological story to really trying to turn the corner and be aggressive with the story that everything was going to be suppressed,” she said.

But while the media, politicians and the public lamented the loss of the nation’s first national park, the fire itself was performing a service to the scores of plant and animal species that had, over the millennia, evolved to benefit from fire.

Despite Hodel’s dire predictions, trees along the park’s byways began to grow by themselves.

According to Olliff, the fire’s immediate effect on the park’s animal life was minimal. In total, park staff documented the loss of 242 elk, nine bison and three moose. Bears and deer seemed to avoid the short-term effects of the fire completely.

Contrary to popular belief, animals did not flee in terror as the various complexes tore through their habitat. In fact, Olliff recalls several instances where elk and bison where grazing while a crown fire ignited the forest behind them.

However, the total effect on elk was delayed. About 20 percent of the park’s winter range, and 60 percent of the summer range, was lost to fire and drought. About 5,000 elk died the following winter.

“The drought that caused the fires also reduced the forage capacity,” Olliff said. “Elk went into winter in bad shape.”

Yellowstone went into the winter with 17,000 elk and came out the next spring with 12,000. But four years later, the park’s population had rebounded again to 17,000 animals.

Perhaps the species that benefited the most from the fires was lodgepole pine. Lodgepole is a so-called “fire dependant” tree that requires the high heat to melt the sap that seals its serotinous pine cones, thereby releasing the seeds.

“Lodgepole pine is live fast, die young and leave a lot of offspring,” said Olliff.

Aspen trees also benefited, but their resurgence in Yellowstone was short lived. “After ’88 we saw aspen seedlings everywhere,” Olliff said. “By the time they got knee-high, they’d been browsed out or out-competed.”

How the plant species rebounded in the years after the fire depended on how hot the fire burned and what type of soil it burned on, according to Don Despain and Roy Renkin, vegetation experts during the fires of ’88.

Rhyolitic soil, which is high in quartz, is not as good a growth medium for some species, and primarily supported lodgepole after the fires. Andicitic soils, on the other hand, make for a much richer growth medium and can support almost double the number of species, including spruce and fir.

Where heat from the fire was unable to penetrate more than a few inches into the soil, the rhizomes, roots, seeds and bulbs of an existing species could often survive. The fire also gave some dormant species a chance to re-establish themselves in areas where they hadn’t been seen for years.

Following the fire, millions of showy asters made an appearance on the hillsides in Yellowstone. The species hardly ever flowers in the unburned forest.

The researchers also saw Bicknell’s geranium, a species that was so rare in the park that plant experts didn’t recognize it at first. The geranium’s seeds, it turns out, were in the ground all along, they just needed a fire for the chance to germinate.

And that was just the beginning. Pine grass, daisy, fleabanes, huckleberries, honeysuckle and especially fireweed all flourished after the fires of ’88.

Still, most of the species that existed in a given location persisted after the fires.

“People were thinking of these wholesale changes in plant communities that really didn’t happen,” Despain said. “The plant species that were there prior to the burn were there after the burn, just the proportion of those species changes a little.”

Benefiting wildlife

In the years following the ’88 fires, the blackened earth and seeming devastation they left behind were just as important to animals as they were to plants.

Birds like woodpeckers, flycatchers and seed-eaters found more abundant food and better opportunities for nesting. Large bodied raptors also fared well. The park’s population of osprey, for instance, jumped from 60 nesting pairs in 1988 to 100 nesting pairs by 1994. By 1999, the population had declined to 60 nesting pairs again.

Grazers like elk and bison found more grasses in the open spaces left behind by the burns. “Bison have had an eight to 14 percent annual growth rate since 1988,” Olliff said. “There’s more stuff to graze on.”

The Canada lynx, an endangered species, is reaping the benefits of the ’88 fires today. In the winter, the lynx feed primarily on snowshoe hares – and hares, it turns out, like 20-year-old trees.

Grizzy bears benefited despite the fact that 28 percent of the park’s whitebark pine stands burned, according to Olliff. Like lodgepole, whitebark is a fire dependant species. But more than that, grizzly bears are “omnivore generalists” who, in addition to meat, eat a lot of vegetation like grasses and forbes.

“They need a diverse landscape and fires create a diverse landscape,” Olliff said.

One species that did not benefit from the Yellowstone fires was moose. Moose on the northern range tend to migrate up slope during the winter into mature spruce/fir forests. According to Olliff, the moose rely on a thick tree canopy to catch the snow.

“We lost a lot of really important moose habitat,” he said. “The moose population really hasn’t rebounded. I don’t think moose will rebound; I think they will persist in low numbers. They will be back in big numbers in a 100 years or so.”

Anzelmo said the summer of 1989 marked one of the park’s best years in terms of visitors.

“At the end of the fire season we began to talk about what visitors could expect,” she said. “We wanted to let the world know that Yellowstone was alive and well. You could still see bison being born in April. The meadows were much more lush. The wildflowers were unbelievable in ’89.”

Still, Anzelmo said Yellowstone in 1989 defied what some visitors had come to expect.

“It could be really harsh for the people who love the perpetual green postcard of the forest,” she said. “A lot of the media termed it ‘the rebirth of Yellowstone National Park,’ but as [former superintendent] Bob Barbee said, ‘Yellowstone never died.’

“We were never meant to be a postcard,” Anzelmo continued. “National parks are meant to be living, breathing things.”