Bob Edwards: This is Morning Edition, I’m Bob Edwards.

Ten years ago this summer a series of fires burned two million acres in and around Yellowstone National Park, leaving a charred landscape and many questions about the so-called let-it-burn policy. NPR’s Alex Chadwick covered the Yellowstone fires back then. This summer he returned to the park for a National Geographic Radio Expedition and discovered that a decade later the [United States National] Park Service is still measuring the impact of the fires of ‘88.

Alex Chadwick: (SOUND EFFECT: STREAM) I’m wading Cub Creek, upstream from where it runs into Yellowstone Lake. (SOUND EFFECT: MECHANICAL FISH COUNTER) Researchers are counting trout, slippery flashes of brown in the mosaic patterns and color of stream bottom and surface light. The trout are food for bears, which is what the Park Service naturalist Dan Reinhart is actually studying—bears. I don’t see any.

Dan Reinhart: They’re probably bedded down, maybe 50 yards [45 meters] from us, and they’re probably aware that we’re there. They’ll probably just stay put. I think they feel pretty secure here.

Chadwick: (SOUND EFFECT: FOREST AMBIENCE) Sure, they feel secure—they’re bears. But what about the research assistant who’s carrying a plastic gallon milk jug half full of... blood, to be left here to lure the animals near a small barbwire snare.

Unidentified man: I just got the blood from the slaughterhouse and have been letting it sit out in the sun to get their interest so they come over here and check it out when they’re fishing, so we can get their hair on the barbwire.

Chadwick: (SOUND EFFECT: HIKING THROUGH CREEK) Field scientists all around the park collect animal hair and plant cuttings, and gather data about beetles and beehives. The fires are grand-scale history, which is why researchers like Dan Reinhart are busy scribbling down every detail.

Reinhart: About half of the Yellowstone Lake drainage basin burned in 1988. Fortunately, only four streams were severely affected by the burns. I don’t think there was a negative response of the grizzly bear population from the fires of 1988. I think that the canopy opened up, and vegetation production increased. We did lose some whitebark pine; whitebark pine is a very important food source for Yellowstone bears.

Chadwick: (SOUND EFFECT: HORSES PASSING) A pack train of horses and riders and mules that’s following a trail down through the woods splashes past us—Yellowstone visitors enjoying the park exactly as they have for more than a century. The fire never reached this section of the wilderness; it still feels as though nothing harmful ever could—a green fortress, safe.

(SOUND EFFECT: CARS PASSING) But across the lake, at Grant Village, other visitors, who’ve just driven up from the south entrance, get out of their cars and go looking for someone like Park Service guide Nancy Proctor.

Nancy Proctor: It’s a pretty stark 20-mile [32-kilometer] drive, and when people come into the visitors center, we can tell in people’s eyes what they’re going to say when they come up to the desk is, “What is all this devastation?”

Chadwick: Patches of dead forest run for miles, with the trees still standing. They haven’t fallen yet. It’s actually disturbing to see them.

Proctor: They will be angry that we let this burn. People do not perceive Yellowstone as coming back. They don’t understand what happened that summer. The concepts of fighting fires were thrown out the window during that summer of ‘88.

Chadwick: (SOUND EFFECT: WIND) The spring that year is rainy, but the summer that follows is dry and hot, and the wind blows. (SOUND EFFECT: FIRE #1) Some of the fires start from lightning, some from carelessness. (SOUND EFFECT: FIRE #2) They grow frighteningly bigger, so large that the men and women fighting them are dwarfed by it into tiny figures in sooty yellow gear.

John Varley: It smelled awful. It smelled like being in the middle of a bonfire.

Chadwick: John Varley, a senior Park Service official.

Varley: You could taste it in your food and in your sleep, and you had the feeling that you always needed a shower.

Chadwick: In August hundreds of thousands of acres in and around Yellowstone are burning. Incredibly, there are days when some fires, already huge, double in size.

Varley: They were on the television every night, in living color, and the smoke and the soot-smudged firefighters and the talking heads, back and forth, whether it’s about policy or the fire or whatever—they lived it.

Chadwick: It’s an interesting time for the Park Service. It is thinking differently than it used to about fires. Those that occur naturally are part of the ecology; only human-caused fires will be fought. But few of us really follow policy changes until something dramatic happens. And in the summer of 1988, it does. John Varley.

Varley: We were trying to say, “No, media, quit reporting that this place is destroyed, in ruins, and devastated. Because, ecologically, it’s anything but dead.”

Chadwick: Nonetheless, the fires force the Park Service to close most of Yellowstone. Townspeople living nearby could be burned out or—almost as bad—bankrupted because visitors are afraid to come. Many blame the “natural fire,” or “let it burn,” policy.

Varley: We thought the vigilantes were going to come and string us up.

Chadwick: Instead, federal officials arrive. The Park Service announces an emergency policy change: Every fire will be fought. The reversal hardly matters, fire experts say. The conditions in the summer of ‘88—drought and wind—are beyond policy. That is why the fires billow and flourish until fall, when rain and snow come at last.

(SOUND EFFECT: NANCY PROCTOR INTRODUCING HERSELF TO TOUR GROUP) Ten years later people return to Yellowstone, from bikers on Harleys to babies in backpacks. (SOUND EFFECT: MOTORCYCLE PASSING) They come to see the glories of the world’s first national park, like those ospreys circling and calling, hundreds of feet above us. (SOUND EFFECT: OSPREYS CALLING)

Proctor: [Guiding a tour] We’ll get a real good example from up top of the pattern that fire burns, in what is called a mosaic. During the fires of ‘88—if you can imagine these fires just roaring through the crowns, carrying pieces of burning vegetation, that literally lobbed these firebrands up to a mile and a half in front of the fire lines.

Chadwick: Sometimes Park Service guide Nancy Proctor leads visitors on hikes to talk about the fires. From the crest of a hill you can see the stark contrast: miles of trees in either direction—green to the north, dead gray to the south. Fully one-third of Yellowstone burned.

Proctor: It’s an emotional struggle for people.

Chadwick: Still?

Proctor: Yes. Intellectually, they can understand the role of fire, it’s function in a forest, that it cleans out diseased trees, it reduces ground fuels. Fire in Yellowstone restores nutrients back to the soil in the form of ash, whereas decaying or decomposing of a tree that’s lying on the ground can take 80 to 100 years. So it bypasses that whole thing, and it restores it right away. People can understand what the weather conditions were, what the firefighters were up against. But still they’ll leave the visitors center shaking their heads, saying, “It’s just terrible, it’s just terrible.”

Chadwick: It is terrible to see, some of it, from inside a car, which is how many people tour the park. But when you walk a little ways into the woods, something else begins to emerge. That story tomorrow, when this Radio Expedition continues.

For Radio Expeditions, this is Alex Chadwick, NPR News, Yellowstone National Park.

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