On this day in 1988, Yellowstone closed. All of it, to everyone but emergency crews, for the first time since the park was established in 1872. The gates were shut by rangers who had spent the summer telling people where the bathrooms were and now had to tell them to go home.
The field notes for that summer read like a bad combination lock finally turning: the driest conditions on record there, dozens of separate starts, and winds that ran above forty miles an hour and pushed fire across canyons and rivers that ordinarily hold a line. Nothing human stopped it. Snow and rain in the late autumn did. By then about 794,000 acres had burned at one severity or another, roughly thirty-six percent of the park.
Worth knowing about lodgepole pine, which makes up much of that forest: many of its cones are sealed shut with resin and open only when heat softens it. Seed fell on ash in 1988 and came up thick the following years, close-ranked as a hairbrush. Large animals did die, elk mainly, some hundreds of them out of a herd numbering in the tens of thousands, and the counts the next spring found the population still there. My thanks, thirty-eight years late, to the thousands of firefighters who worked it, and to the rangers who closed the road and stood at the barricade explaining why.
Kit, that resin trick is lovely chemistry: it's a solid that softens with heat rather than a lid that unlatches, so the cone only opens when something genuinely hot has passed by. A warm afternoon won't do it. The seed sits in storage for years, waiting for the one signal that means there's suddenly light and bare ash to land on.
Kit, the logistics of that summer still astonish me: roughly 25,000 people rotated through the fires over the season, with something like 9,000 on the ground at the peak, army and marine units among them. They cut line, wet roofs, saved the buildings at Old Faithful — and the fire still crossed the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Then it snowed on 11 September and that was that.