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PrintFlames of Controversy
Twenty summers ago, Yellowstone National Park and portions of Jackson Hole burned in front of a worldwide audience
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I’m going to share a long-held secret with you,” John Varley says. “It’s something I’ve seldom revealed, other than to the people who were there with me that summer in the park.”
When Varley looks back at the historic Yellowstone forest fires of 1988, the former chief park scientist thinks about his days in a metaphorical bunker. Today, twenty years later, there’s still a quiver of trauma in his voice as he reflects on a summer when everything seemed ablaze and out of control.
While the whole world watched America’s first national park burn, Varley’s challenge was not evading flames and smoke. The bane of his existence was a constant barrage of sensationalized media coverage and a raining down of gratuitous political heat.
A simple recitation of statistics speaks to the epic nature of 1988, though it does little to recreate the sense of “you-had-to-be-there” chaos that gripped the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and, at the same time, ushered in a dramatic shift in the way society talks about wildfire in the modern West.
“We realized early on that we were dealing with something unprecedented, and when it is unprecedented, it’s not predictable,” Varley says. “What happened was so far outside the bounds of any model we had for fire behavior. Conditions were extreme.”
From mid-July through the end of September, in a year that marked the final months of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it was impossible to be anywhere near the intersection of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana and escape the heavy pall of choking wood smoke. Jackson Hole, too, was cloaked in a heavy murky fog that obstructed the Tetons for days on end.
That summer, 248 different fires covering 1.2 million acres blackened a significant part of the greater Yellowstone region. Some fifty of those blazes were in Yellowstone alone, ultimately blackening 793,000 acres, or roughly 36 percent of the park’s total area.
More than 25,000 firefighters, more individuals than the biggest town in the region held, descended upon Yellowstone. Although just seven of the blazes accounted for 95 percent of the acreage burned, lesser known to the public is that five of those fires actually started outside the park.
In all, more than $120 million, a record amount at the time, was spent trying to tame the conflagrations. Wildfires caused hundreds of thousands of tourists to stay away, setting off a domino effect of hardship for restaurateurs, motel and gas station owners, and outfitters.
In turn, the mushroom clouds visible hundreds of miles downwind resulted in politicians trying to pin the blame on anyone they could. Consider this expression of rhetorical finger pointing delivered by then-veteran U.S. Senator Alan Simpson of Cody to fellow lawmakers in 1988: “Yellowstone may well have been destroyed by the very people who were assigned to protect it. Let me tell you, colleagues, the ground is sterilized. It is blackened to the depths of any root system within it. Prescribed burns could have reduced the fuel loads in order to prevent the inferno rate we see this summer. So I think that it is time to quit playing God in Yellowstone.”
Among the slanderous charges leveled at Varley, Superintendent Bob Barbee, park fire specialist Don Despain, and their colleagues were claims of “monumental incompetence.” Politicos called for the superintendent’s removal and they, along with Barbie and Ken doll-look-alike television journalists—trying to make themselves appear fashionable in their government issue yellow shirts and green trousers—astoundingly said that America’s first national park was dead; by extension, they likened Yellowstone to a barren moonscape that never again would support life.
In hindsight, given the emerging green forest that covers Yellowstone today, Simpson’s indictment of park officials seems outlandish. “There were some really ugly things alleged,” Varley says.
A focal point was Yellowstone’s misrepresented “let-burn” fire policy. Far from being a philosophy that advocated the unmitigated spread of all fires, it was based on the attitude of allowing smaller fires to burn, within narrow prescriptions, to achieve desired ecological effects.
Critics said Yellowstone, rather than allowing a few fires to burn in July, should have put the early blazes out immediately. But amid severe lack of moisture, a deluge of dry lightning strikes, and tempest winds, the eruption of new fires almost every week afterward quickly made it a moot point.
Varley speaks of the futility of expensive attempts to control the flames. The secret he reveals is that during the tensest days of 1988, he was ordered by superiors to stop sharing what some had dubbed the “Varley Happy Face Story,” a euphemism for his ecological perspective that Yellowstone would, in the years that followed, actually be better off as a result of the flames that had been suppressed for a century.
“They told me you’ve got to quit giving the happy-faced story to journalists, because it was considered insulting to the firefighters who were out there every day putting their lives on the line,” he says. “I can understand that. I wasn’t trying to be glib. For me to be saying it was no big deal for wildfires to be burning didn’t square with the attempts being made by those who were being ordered to fight the fires on the ground and in the air.”
Fortunately, no one died on the ground and none of the park’s major hotels or historic structures was lost. One of the greatest lessons from Yellowstone that still ripples today is the reality that when big fires burn, and are fueled by weather conditions and drought, there is little that can be done, by way of money, manpower, or containment techniques, to stop them.
Andy Norman, a forest fuel specialist with the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Jackson, is involved in a national dialogue occurring within the Forest Service regarding when fires should be left to burn and when they need to be attacked. He sympathizes with what his fellow civil servants encountered in Yellowstone in 1988. Part of the grief they endured stemmed from generations of Americans who had visited the park and did not want the aesthetics of the scenery to change, he says.
In actuality, National Park Service and Forest Service management approaches to wildfire, rejecting the mantra that all fires are “bad” as symbolized by Smokey Bear, had been evolving since the 1970s.
