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YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - During the final month of the 1988 fire season, as flames marched across more than a third of Yellowstone National Park, at least one scientist hoped just a little more of the forest would burn.
“I had the neatest job in the universe, I think, during 1988,” said Roy Renkin, a vegetation specialist for the National Park Service.
Renkin, 50, arrived in Yellowstone in 1979, working on forestry and fire management projects. In 1987, he helped produce a vegetation map of the entire park. Before the 1988 fires, he had been researching connections between fire, vegetation and ungulate populations.
Though he helped with fire efforts for much of the summer, Renkin also continued his research. He exhaustively cataloged about two dozen vegetation plots in areas where advancing flames were likely to burn through. About 15 of those plots did burn, but not before Renkin had counted every green leaf.
“I've spent a considerable amount of my career since then revisiting all of those plots,” he said, showing the kind of long-haul enthusiasm that can come only from studying a forest ecosystem where 300 years is not an impossible lifespan.
And though 1988 was a one-of-a-kind fire year, smaller “megafires” have happened in each of the past three centuries and are likely to happen again in this century, Renkin said.
“What happened in '88 was nothing new. It was new to us, because we live only about 70 years,” he said.
Renkin dispels misconceptions that the 1988 fires devastated the park, while also marveling that a major fire's “legacy on the landscape can be felt not only for decades, but as long as 200 years.”
Within days of the fires, new grasses and plants like fireweed had sprouted.
Lodgepole pines - which produce conventional pine cones and also serotinous cones that release seeds only when exposed to great heat - dispersed from 15,000 to 2 million seeds per acre. An average of 2,000 to 12,000 later germinated in each acre.
About 24 percent of the park's whitebark pine forest burned, but by 1995, whitebark pine seedlings had been found in every one of 275 study plots established to chart regrowth after the fire.
“We were very concerned about the spread of non-native vegetation in the burned areas,” Renkin said.
But besides Canada thistle - a temporary post-fire success thanks to its small, wind-borne seeds and deep roots - few invasive species took hold in significant numbers.
That first winter was a stark, black-and-white portrait of burned trees and snow, Renkin said, but the following summer brought “the greatest wildflower show ever.”
“Boom! The purple lupine came out. Then the daisies would come on,” he said.
After widespread news reports on the fires, throngs of curious people showed up the next summer, and 1989 was the busiest year of the decade.
Some predicted a grim future for the park, especially along a 660-acre site known as Blowdown, accessible from the road between Norris Junction and Canyon Village.
A windstorm in 1984 had toppled thousands of trees, flattening an east-west corridor that ran for miles. The 1988 North Fork Fire burned with particular ferocity through the Blowdown, turning nearly everything there to ash.
“It was just nuked,” Renkin said. “It looked like the bottom of a barbecue grill. The predictions were that it would be a meadow for centuries. People talked about how the soil was sterilized.”
But just the opposite happened, as the Blowdown site has seen the most energetic regrowth since the fires. The mineral-rich ash and direct sunlight yielded lodgepole pines now ranging from 15-18 feet tall, compared with an average of about 7 feet over the rest of the park.
The summer of 1988 was “a watershed fire year,” marking “the biggest change in our approach to fire since 1910,” said Al Nash, the park spokesman.
Interpreters and educators in the park still work to convince visitors that Yellowstone was neither destroyed nor devastated in the great blazes, but memories of unending clouds of smoke and ferocious firestorms linger in the minds of many.
A documentary about the fires remains the second-best-selling video in gift shops operated by concessionaire Xanterra, said Rick Hoeninghausen, vice president for sales and marketing.
Scott and Stephanie Karkowski, visiting Yellowstone last month from Pittsburgh, said they were surprised to see large stands of burned trees. But they weren't much interested in the 1988 fires until they read about descriptions of young forests in trail guides.
“It's just cool to be here and see all this, and kind of fun to learn about what happened,” Stephanie Karkowski said.
Many younger visitors are unaware of the 1988 fires, as some sagebrush flats and other spots appear fully recovered to the casual observer, Renkin said.
“A lot of people drive through and don't realize it ever burned,” he said. |
