The Summer Everything Burned

The summer of nineteen eighty-eight was the driest in Yellowstone's recorded history. Lightning struck the forest in June. The fires that followed burned through July, August, and September, driven by drought conditions and winds that outran every attempt at suppression. By the time autumn rains finally damped the last of them, approximately one point four million acres across the Greater Yellowstone area had burned. That is roughly thirty-six percent of the national park.

The Old Faithful Inn came within hours of being lost. Firefighters stationed on the roof held hoses on the structure through the night of September seventh as the North Fork fire drove flames toward the Upper Geyser Basin. The historic building survived. Several outbuildings did not.

The political reaction was fierce. Critics demanded the National Park Service abandon its natural fire management policy, which since nineteen seventy-two had allowed lightning-caused fires to burn unless they threatened human life or structures. Park managers and ecologists resisted. They argued that a century of fire suppression had created unnaturally dense fuel loads, and that large fires were within the historical range of the Yellowstone ecosystem. The debate was not academic; it played out in Congress and on the national news every night of that summer.

The ecologists were right. The spring of nineteen eighty-nine brought wildflower blooms of extraordinary density across the burn areas. Lodgepole pines, whose serotinous cones open only with intense heat, released their seeds across millions of acres simultaneously. What looked like devastation from the road was the forest resetting. The diversity of habitats created by the mosaic of burned and unburned forest has made Yellowstone richer, not poorer. The nineteen eighty-eight fires are now studied as a landmark event in fire ecology. The Inn still stands.