Last year, Yellowstone National Park burned for five months. There was much flame and ash. Whole mountainsides turned black. An elk herd suffocated in the smoke.
Perhaps you saw televised footage of wildfires closing in on Old Faithful and wondered why nobody called 911 sooner. Me, too.
That logical question was posed by hundreds of journalists, including me, who covered the Yellowstone fires. But we`re getting way ahead of ourselves.
Toward the end of last July I was dispatched by my newspaper with photographer Lew Stamp to Grant Village, a cozy little campground near the southern end of the park that nearly burned to the ground the night before our arrival.
For a week, we ate, drank and spit smoke. We traipsed around wearing the firefighter`s nonflammable, government-issue yellow shirt and green trousers. The accommodations-five nights on hard ground-were unmatched anywhere. We stayed up late watching great walls of fire come right at us until we collapsed in sleeping bags with red neckerchiefs tied over our faces to filter smoke. We felt like rodeo clowns from hell.
Newspapers love stories about the aftermath of calamities. The wildfires qualified for a follow-up, so we were dispatched again, returning to the park the second week of May.
Stamp with his Nikon, me with a notebook, the two of us set out on a search for the sequel: Yellowstone II: After the Fire.
More than two million adults and children from all over the world come to Yellowstone, the nation`s oldest national park, every year. Park officials predict that the record-2.6 million visitors in 1987-will be shattered this year simply because of what happened last year.
If Evva Sandve`s bustling curio shop is any indication, that prediction is well on its way to coming true.
Mrs. Sandve manages Gold Strike Gifts in Gardiner, a tiny town about two miles from the north entrance to Yellowstone. Since the park opened on May 1, Mrs. Sandve has sold everything from books and bear claws to elk-antler jewelry and rattlesnake heads. Her customers come from Australia and Idaho, Pennsylvania and Germany, Illinois and France.
”They`re curious (to see) how much of the park burned,” Mrs. Sandve says.
The simple answer is that about 1.2 million acres, more than half of the park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, was touched by fire. It took the coldest, snowiest winter in eight years to extinguish the last flames.
But because of the complex and unpredictable paths that wildfires take, only about 440,000 acres really show signs of actually having burned.
Some of those acres were among Mrs. Sandve`s favorites.
Mrs. Sandve, 67, first visited the park with her husband and children in 1949. ”I love that park,” she says.
Fires forced the evacuation of Yellowstone`s visitors for five weeks last September and October. During that period Mrs. Sandve`s monthly sales dropped from $22,000 to $12,000. She remembers crying then.
”But not about the financial damage,” she explains. ”For the trees.”
On another visit this year on May 10: The morning is a beaut. Rocky Mountain sunshine filters through the forest shadows and lights up tiny blue wildflowers. But the pungent smell of pine sap doesn`t last long enough. There`s also a dead elk.
”Winter kill,” says the man wearing a dirty red baseball cap.
Park biologist Roy Renkin, the man in the cap, makes it sound so banal.
”Could`ve been too old,” he says. ”Could`ve spent himself last fall in mating.”
Could`ve this, could`ve that.
Point is moot
High on a slope overlooking Yellowstone Lava Creek, the precise cause of death makes little difference now. Not to Renkin, 32, who studies forest ecosystems. It certainly makes no difference now to the bull elk whose carcass is rotting at our feet.
His antlers are gone, sawed off by poachers, Renkin figures, and smuggled to the black market in another hemisphere. Overseas, mashed-up elk antler cures whatever ails you. So they say.
Other scavengers have torn open the hindquarters. The rib cage looks to be the size of an oil drum. Thirsty flies buzz in and out. Coyotes and ravens have strewn tufts of blond fur across the ground in their frenzied rush for the kidneys, liver and gallbladder.
”His biological clock,” Renkin says, ”just ran out.”
Pondering biological clocks, we tramp on. One animal dies so that scavengers may stick it out for another season. A mundane lesson from Zoology 101 seeps into my bone marrow.
Bull elks look too invincible to die.
Stamp and I wanted a good look at a grizzly bear.
Good luck, park officials told us. What they really meant was that we`d need it if we saw one.
Hopes melt away
As the week progressed, our hopes of laying eyes on a griz melted like the heaps of dirty snow around us. That`s because Winnebagos, called ”land whales” in rangerese, outnumber the bears by a revolting margin here.
The return to Yellowstone turns out to be a study in contrasts.
One afternoon the palpable stench of a rotting bison sneaks in on the heels of a pine-scented breeze.
Every spring a few carcasses of elk and buffalo greet Yellowstone visitors. But this year carcasses litter the park. Most starved to death. Scientists blame a brutal winter, last summer`s drought, the wildfires and especially the overgrazing of the land by increasing populations of both species.
Some 573,000 acres of the park suffered canopy or tree-top burn; in another 367,000 acres the ground growth burned, but not the trees, and 55,000 acres of meadowland went up in smoke, but ought to be green again in a month or two. In fact, wherever the late spring snowpack has melted, new grass blades poke their way up through ash, waiting to be browsed by the famished moose and elk.
Sheep put on a show
North of Mammoth Hot Springs, families pile out of mini-vans to glimpse three bighorn sheep tap-dancing on a cliff.
Down by the Nez Perce River, a baby buffalo takes his first unsteady steps across a meadow before an audience consisting of his exhausted mother and a few people with cameras.
Late one afternoon at Old Faithful, a sudden snowstorm camouflages the world`s most famous geyser.
Umbrellas spring open. Kids stick out their tongues to get a taste of winter in Yellowstone.
No ”news” here. Just overwhelming evidence that Yellowstone`s obituary, to paraphrase Mark Twain, was highly exaggerated.
The first time I met Dan Sholly, Yellowstone`s chief ranger was vigorously disputing the claims of an angry Montana sheep rancher, who was standing at my side.
The sheep rancher had argued that the North Fork should be extinguished now to protect nearby towns in its path. Sholly responded that Mother Nature, not firefighters, called the shots.
Opinion unchanged
In May, I reminded Sholly of our conversation. His tune hadn`t changed.
”The fires were awesome,” he said from behind his desk. ”Man wasn`t in control. Man was just here. I feel humbled just to have been here to feel it.”
Equally awesome are the hurdles park workers jump to cover their tracks. Near Gibbon Falls, Eleanor Williams demonstrates that effort by drawing a wavy line in the dirt with her finger. The line represents an imaginary cutting boundary 100 feet from the road. Its waviness reflects the pattern that two steel-helmeted loggers are following to fell dead trees.
”Nothing in nature is a straight line,” Williams says.
Some 50,000 dead or dying trees in Yellowstone pose a hazard to road traffic. Trees nearest the roads must come down. The loggers purposely meander along from snag to snag, severing trunks with huge chain saws.
By summer`s end, snags will be reduced to 2-by-4s, courtesy of a Livingston, Mont., lumber mill. Their absence from Yellowstone should be undetectable to the human eye.
Monitor of park`s pulse
Robert Barbee keeps his finger on Yellowstone`s pulse. Like the 800 people who work for him, the park superintendent proudly wears the National Park Service uniform-gray shirt, green trousers, boots and broad-brimmed Smokey the Bear hat. Deck him out in a Brooks Brothers suit and black wingtips, and the superintendent with his $13 million budget could pass for any corporate chairman of the board.
Being interviewed goes with his 2.2-million-acre territory. It gives Barbee a chance to tell the world how news coverage was uninformed, sensationalized and just plain misleading.
”I don`t want to sound hostile to the media,” he said, sounding a tad hostile, ”but they did a bad job. The park-service reputation suffered.”
Barbee, 53, gives good quotes. He knows it. And he doesn`t dispute that walls of flame, fed by 70 m.p.h. winds, presented a ”catastrophic dimension” for Yellowstone`s tiny border towns. Tourist trade suffered.
”Our fundamental purpose,” Barbee says, ”is not to support local commerce.”
To underscore the mutable quality of ecosystems, Barbee tells me: ”This place isn`t to be dipped in formaldehyde.” (His quip had already appeared in at least two other newspapers I`d seen.)
A blunt man
Whether he`s being questioned by a reporter from the New York Times or from the Billings (Montana) Gazette, the man with the steel-blue eyes gives no quarter. He doesn`t have to. The fires are out now and Barbee has weathered the political storms generated by Yellowstone`s let-it-burn policy.
”We took a lot of heavy hits,” he says.
That opinion is echoed by Conrad Smith, an Ohio State University journalism professor, who told me that television and print reporters blew it. His analysis of coverage of the Yellowstone fires in 112 newspaper and magazine articles concluded that readers got a vivid impression that Yellowstone burned down. His current study of network TV news indicates the electronic press fared no better.
”Many journalists . . . treated it (the fires) as nothing more than a disaster story,” Smith said in a phone interview.
Of course, it was a disaster story to Jim Cole.
The 62-year-old resident of Gardiner lost more than a month`s business last fall when firefighters evacuated the Old Faithful Inn, a mammoth log hotel near the famous geyser, where he plies his trade as a landscape artist. But money really wasn`t the issue for him.
”I feel sorry for the people who know what this park looked like,” Cole says. ”There are certain areas of the park I`ve seen since I was a little kid that will never be the same in my grandchildren`s grandchildren`s lifetimes.” Outside the Old Faithful Inn, Edgar and Miriam Smith aren`t looking for sympathy. The elderly couple from Moultrie, Ga., are unfazed by the panorama of ash around them.
”Trees`ll grow back,” says Smith, 73.
This trip, their third visit in more than a decade, has been the best.
They stroll arm-in-arm past Yellowstone`s best-known geyser. Snowflakes fall. Earlier in the day, the couple had witnessed the birth of a buffalo calf. They are all smiles.
”Hope to see a grizzly,” Smith says with a wink at me.
Good luck, I reply. And I mean it. –
