While Yellowstone Burned
Morrison, Micah
Micah Morrison WHILE YELLOWSTONE BURNED A survivor of this summer's fires reports that only Washington bureaucrats and environmentalists could have concocted a "let it burn" policy during a time...
...Billy did not think this was such a terrific idea, but I convinced him...
...To get to the base camp, the Storm Creek fire would have to advance a few miles south into Soda Butte Creek somewhere around the northeast entrance to Yellowstone, then push a mile east through the forest to Silver Gate, three more miles on to Cooke City, and a mile out to Cooke Pass...
...The high winds finally had arrived...
...Billy cracked open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel's and passed it around...
...We drove through the gate and into the Lamar Valley...
...Late in the evening I returned to Cooke City...
...In Washington, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel announced that the "let it burn" policy would be "reviewed...
...By the time I left the mountains 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 again, Cooke Pass would be in flames and the Storm Creek base camp would be evacuated, along with the three communities...
...Fires were now raging at the only two exits from Cooke...
...Patches of flame rose along the line, pouring smoke, and slowly inched into the forest...
...He knew everyone would do their best...
...others said that if the...
...He Was right, but nobody else wanted to admit it...
...The left side of the road was a blackened wasteland...
...Elsewhere in and around the park, other fires continued to spread...
...The press had been issued fire-resistant clothes, including a reassuring little gizmo called a fire shelter...
...As man was the source of all evil," writes Alston Chase in his devastating account of environmental practices and politics, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park,' "expelling him became the way to restore and preserve wilderness...
...We were about through with talking, and I was about through with fires...
...The "fuel' the woods—had never been dryer, the ignition probabilities had never been higher...
...Many of these fires have since been extinguished or have merged into larger fires...
...Within minutes fire mushroomed from the treetops with a sound like crashing waves...
...I saw an owl swoop down through the smoky daylight, a sign of a hard winter ahead, I was told...
...It's here...
...glowed orange...
...Thick smoke and wind gusted about in the trees...
...that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends...
...Smoke and drifting ash obscured the heavily forested mountains on both sides of Soda Butte Creek...
...Two-tenths of a mile away, Dave Liebersbach's backburn smouldered fitfully...
...By late Sunday afternoon, the bulldozers had been pulled off the line and the burnback was ready to begin...
...Late that night, Billy and I drove back to Silver Gate...
...The idea, again, was to take away the Storm Creek fire's fuel before the fire moved into the valley...
...I can't believe this is happening," John said...
...I could stay in their rented home in the hills at the edge of town (the side farthest from the approaching fire) as long as I wanted...
...My abode, of course, was empty...
...they seemed tiny beneath the flaming forest...
...Other commanders in the area had similar force structures, although some equipment and personnel were shifted between the variousfire commands according to need...
...In fourteen hours, the line was cut...
...The dog, however, was still with us too, lying on a porch and chewing a stick...
...Where will they go...
...The winds were expected to blow the two fires together sometime in the next 'Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10.95...
...The problem with the American ecologists, ninety-five percent of them, is that they don't live in the forest...
...Winds kicked up many of the Yellowstone fires, but the Storm Creek-Hellroaring fire idled down outside of Silver Gate and never did reach the towns...
...The problem, said Jim Moore, editor of Red Lodge's Carbon County News, "is that we have no weight out here, no political weight...
...long winters bring it down to about one hundred...
...This is the final line of defense to save Silver Gate and Cooke City," a firefighter told me...
...Westerners strongly feel that they have no say in what happens to the land they live in...
...Some firefighters said the Silver Gate backburn was a mistake...
...Remarks like that were what tempted people into thinking about necktie parties for the Park Service...
...You have to back off and take the fire on its own terms...
...At the base camp, plans were changing fast...
...But the hills north of town were forests no more: they had become a glowing graveyard of embers driven through with the black stakes of dead trees...
...He ran to join his crew...
...one of my friends asked me...
...We stared at the terrifying beauty and he said, "Fire in the wilderness—you can't put people in front of fire like this...
...Mister, Yellowstone has burned to the ground—that is a fact...
...He didn't really mean it...
...A couple of miles south of Cooke, the gargantuan Clover-Mist fire (a July coupling of the Clover fire and the Mist fire) had rolled across two hundred thousand acres...
...What will happen to these people if the town burns...
...We must stop playing God...
...out too would come a trail of bureaucratic arrogance and inflexibility leading from the northern Rockies right into the offices of federal agencies and the environmental movement...
...As to the question of actually putting the fire out, the reply from taciturn locals, exhausted firefighters, and high-tech fire analysts was the same: pray for rain...
...The survival plan involved having fire crews deliberately start fires to burn out areas in front of the major fire...
...He's okay when he's sober but when he's drunk watch out: he likes to shoot off his guns...
...High winds were expected in forty-eight to seventy-two hours...
...When you allow political bureaucrats to burn down Yellowstone National Park, goddamn it, it's time to be afraid and it's time to ask some very pointed questions...
...In the summer the combined population (excluding the tourists passing through) might go all the way up to three hundred...
...Forest Service, responsible under the Department of Agriculture for the surrounding wilderness areas, were sticking to their "let it burn" policy, a fire-management plan that permits lightning-caused fires to burn until they threaten life or property...
...We drove back...
...Billy had seen enough...
...Somebody's crazy dog cavorted in the street, chasing sticks...
...that individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom...
...His family's ranch was in danger again...
...Will somebody somewhere look this man in the eye and ask him, `Why did you do it, Mr...
...2 Yes, I could just see myself dragging a bloody elk carcass through the streets of Brooklyn...
...Earlier, the air tankers had been through, dropping fire retardant...
...As far as I know, the dog is still there, waiting for some fool to pick up a stick...
...Minutes later some of the trees had turned into bright orange rods and the fire from the high mountains beyond gleamed with an unworldly vicious redness...
...Robert SanGeorge, spokesman for the National Audubon Society in New York, told the New York Times that "we think the calls for Mott to resign are ridiculous...
...Satellites, spotter planes and helicopters, infrared photography and field operatives brought Liebersbach and the others the latest weather and fire intelligence...
...The southwest wind, and the bulldozer line just north of town, had kept the fire away from the Silver Gate structures...
...She paced around the living room...
...Where will people like that go...
...The fire command had decided to set a fire off in the park to deprive the Heliroaring and Storm Creek fires of fuel, containing them before they reached the wooded areas...
...These mini-grenades would explode when they hit the woods a short distance beyond the contingency line...
...The Storm Creek fire was moving south and high winds were on the way...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988...
...I've of necessity simplified here some aspects of a complicated, long-running ecological and historical argument...
...The ranch was dark, silent...
...After loading the freezer into the back of Billy's truck we set out to find the fire...
...As we drove down Cooke City's one street, fire teams in dirty fire-resistant yellow shirts and green pants, yellow hardhats and small backpacks, trudged along the side of the road...
...The fires had closed the road from Cooke City in both directions but they would try to make it through later in the day...
...Bulldozer lines were being cut on the north side of Silver Gate and Cooke...
...It was the second year of extremely dry weather, but the National Park Service, which under the Department of the Interior's authority is responsible for park lands, and the U.S...
...Visibility was low and the air tankers were not expected to be operational...
...I asked the ranger where the Storm Creek fire was...
...M assive fires blew across Yellowstone National Park and other areas of the western United States all summer...
...Barbee and Mr...
...Unbelievable...
...Outside of the Second Edition Cafe the sign read, God Be With Us...
...Fire is part of the Park Service's policy of "natural regulation," a hands-off approach to our national parks and wilderness areas formulated and put into law by Congress at the prodding of environmental activists...
...One of the Forest Service liaisons with the press, Pat Kaunert, explained that a firestorm is a large fire that begins to act as if it had a will of its own, creating its own wind and weather conditions...
...I hurried down to the fire command post and got the latest information...
...The "let it burn" policy is important and necessary, Moore noted, as did practically all the local residents I spoke with, but the folks back in Washington and New York just can't seem to get it into their heads that these are drought years...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 19 few days...
...Though he had bitterly fought Liebersbach's burnback plan, that fight was now past, and in reality the two men were cast from the same mold...
...But the deeper issue is Park Service and Forest Service accountability...
...These days, like those days, the bars are the most popular places in town and you've got to be just a tiny bit crazy to live in Cooke City...
...others were local volunteers, summer wage hunters, or adventurers...
...Storm Creek had merged with the Hellroaring fire, but it was still hanging beyond the burnback area...
...I was told on several occasions that Park Superintendent Barbee now had a security detail around him...
...Liebersbach had ordered another burnout...
...the burnback seemed to be working...
...In Washington, Park Service Director Mott continued to defend the "let it burn" policy...
...We shivered...
...Phone lines were fading in and out, and so was the power...
...Fire flared on the mountains...
...Goddamn Liebersbach...
...Responding to criticism that the Park Service should have recognized the dry conditions earlier, Barbee said, "Obviously, if we could step back in time knowing what we know now, we would have employed different strategies...
...Off to the south, the fire was "spotting" ahead of itself as burning embers drifted down after long flight and a "spotted" tree flared up, a pencil-thin blaze on the distant black mountain...
...I don't know what the solution is, but apparently the environmental elite has created an unchallenged fiefdom in Washington...
...Natural regulation" grew out of the not entirely inaccurate observation in the early 1960s that everything man did in the park lands seemed to lead to disaster for one species or another...
...Helicopters patrolled overhead, watching for spotting across the line...
...The wind at the top of Daisy Pass was cold and hard...
...Uncle Sam, dipping deeper into the manpower pool, mobilized over twothousand soldiers to aid the Yellowstone effort...
...I threw my bag in the back of the pick-up and we took off...
...One of them explained to me that they had great sympathy for the local residents because the firefighters, like the locals, were accustomed to taking care of things for themselves, and so they understood the frustration of having to depend on "outsiders" to handle the situation...
...Are you going to let it burn every year because it's natural...
...John exploded...
...They donate to huge organizations that manipulate the Yellowstone ecosystem from Manhattan—and if you're from Manhattan you gotta realize that's insanity...
...They had a lifetime tied up in the ranch, more than a lifetime, and suddenly they were facing the probability that it would be gone...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 this community went to Mr...
...D One moment a trail of smoke rose from the trees, the next moment the air was crackling and flames leaped a hundred feet into the sky...
...The wind at its back, the fire ran up the hill and east, toward Cooke City...
...The billowing, wind-driven fire was blowing past Cooke, staying north of the fireline and throwing geysers of flame into the sky...
...And ". . the real disgust focuses on what has happened to our national treasure...
...I needed sleep...
...This," Chase noted, "was the message summarized in Barry Commoner's 'Third Law of Ecology': 'Any major man-made change in a natural system,' wrote Commoner, 'is likely to be detrimental to that system.' Whatever man touches he makes worse...
...A cold front with high winds was expected...
...This, he says, would reduce the power of special-interest groups...
...Helicopters hauled water buckets overhead...
...ash fell like snow outside the window...
...The last die-hards were leaving town...
...You bring Mr...
...A moose with a radio-tracking collar around its neck and a calf following close behind jumped out of the burning woods on the north side of 212, crossed the road and ran into the burning woods on the south side, reappeared a moment later and crossed back to the north side, and emerged a few minutes later high on the contingency line...
...Reviewed by William Tucker in TAS, May 1986...
...We've got the facts and the scientific information," Mott told the Gazette on August 30, "and we can convince [Congress] that our policies are proper and ought to be continued...
...Firestorms were a distinct possibility...
...The damage done to the regional economy is important, yes," Moore said, "but the real disgust focuses on what has happened to our national treasure...
...I gave the fire little thought, and soon flew back to New York...
...There's nothing we can do here...
...You know, people like Crazy Pete...
...I t was Monday, and Hays Kirby had 1 a thing or two to say about park policy and the fire outside his door...
...My friends, however, were not so crazy as to get cooked in Cooke...
...he would leave the next day...
...Soon, the burning valley was behind us...
...The problems with the environmentalists are wide and deep...
...These were historic fires, Liebersbach said, a historic year of fires...
...Back in Silver Gate, Kirby and a few others had successfully opposed the evacuation order...
...He can't go to a town...
...John had left to check on his family's ranch and tend to business...
...Toward evening the phone line went dead, and then we lost the power...
...Different fires had been reported moving up on all sides of the ranch...
...avoided meetings and repeatedly rebuffed pleas in June and July to put out the fires...
...Just past dawn I was back in the house, uncertain whether to get some rest or get out, when the phone rang...
...He conceded that in June and into July fires were allowed to burn without containment efforts...
...My bag was packed...
...Figuring that no ranger would be around at this time to bother him about such mundane matters as a license, John waded into Soda Butte Creek and did some fishing...
...We watched them exploding in the trees...
...Billy abruptly pulled over and hid his rifle—it's illegal to bring one into the park—just before we reached the entrance...
...I was in no mood for rain when I first saw smoke from the Storm Creek fire...
...I returned to Cooke...
...A stand of timber less than a half mile from town threw flames hundreds of feet into the sky, below it bright red smoke poured out over the black hills...
...He shouldn't have lit those backburns...
...F orests need fires...
...He had been beating the drum for early action and more resources on the Yellowstone fires for months...
...Postscript: John and his brothers went back to the mountains a day later with generators and a radio-communication system...
...Barbee...
...Assembled in what the locals like to call "God's country" was the best that man could summon for a war with nature: under the authority of Storm Creek Incident Commander David Liebersbach, a bearded, unsmiling fire-management professional from the Alaska Bureau of Land Management, were twelve hundred firefighters from all over the country, nineteen fire engines, seven helicopters, six bulldozers, five C-130 air tankers and two smaller planes...
...Crews and helicopters would stand by to contain the spotting and protect the buildings...
...Hundreds of firefighters were spread out along the line...
...Torchers," carrying cans dripping flame from the snouts, walked along the line, touching fire to brush and trees...
...John's ranch escaped destruction...
...Early that evening, God upped the ante at Yellowstone...
...We drove out of Cooke, down 212 with the still, peaceful, familiar woods on both sides of us, into Silver Gate, where dozens of fire teams and trucks filled the street, and past Silver Gate to the northeast entrance to the park...
...If the winds brought the fire into the valley and the forest in front of Silver Gate was still standing, the towns were finished...
...One moment a trail of smoke rose from the trees, the next moment the air was crackling and flames leaped a hundred feet into the sky...
...Kirby also claims that he presented Barbee with evidence of over one hundred fires at a time when Barbee was stating there were less than fifty fires in the park...
...You just can't go to the goddamn corner grocery store every time you want a hamburger," John explained...
...He was just upset...
...the right side was untouched...
...On the flagpole beside the Grizzly Lodge, Kirby had run up the flag of his home state, Texas, beneath the Stars and Stripes...
...This is a man-made holocaust," Kirby told me...
...He should have let Cooke burn if it came to that...
...They headed for Silver Gate...
...It's nothing short of bureaucratic arson...
...beltway is well known in other areas of the federal government," Chase writes in the May issue of Outside, "but the concept probably applies even better to environmental issues than it does to military or foreign affairs...
...a good many were Indians...
...All day we waited for the wind and the fire...
...Shoot yourself an elk and get yourself a freezer and you'll be eating steak all winter...
...According to many local residents, Yellowstone Superintendent Robert Barbee and National Park Service Director William Penn Mott, Jr...
...I had no idea that I would be back in September to cover the Yellowstone fires, which by that time had burned close to a million acres of magnificent forest lands, cost the taxpayer tens of millions of dollars in Yellowstone alone, and threatened the homes and livelihoods of John's family and friends and hundreds of others...
...Eccentrics and misfits—who needs them...
...Insanity...
...The heat from the ping-pong fires was supposed to help draw the torchers' fire forward...
...Many of the people I spoke with said "let it burn" needs flexibility, a trigger mechanism for unusual circumstances...
...If you were caught in a fire you were supposed to shake the silver tent out of its yellow sack, climb in, hunker down, and wait for the fire to pass over you...
...Back east a week later, the envi- ronmental groups would rise tothe defense of one of their own, rejecting the calls of Montana and Wyoming senators for National Park Service Director Mott's resignation...
...rr he bitterness was running high 1 when I returned to Montana in early September...
...I put down the phone and stepped outside and heard the roar of the fire in the hills above the house...
...that restless, nervous energy...
...Liebersbach gave the towns a one-in-four chance of surviving...
...This 'let it burn' policy is insanity...
...My friends had already removed most of their belongings...
...I'm going to stay and defend my home," Kirby said...
...His sign on the road outside the lodge read on one side, "Give It Hell Guys It Ain't Over Till It's Over," and on the other, "Thanks Mr...
...The winds get hotter and harder...
...W e were at the west edge of Silver Gate, waiting for the blaze, when I asked about the firestorms...
...Only fools, firefighters, and journalists were left in town...
...I caught about two hours sleep, dreaming ofwhite fires moving across black hills, and woke with a start about 3:00 a.m...
...The fire definitely was coming our way...
...Kirby lit another cigarette...
...The street was completely deserted and a bright orange glow to the west showed that the fire from Silver Gate was moving fast on Cooke City...
...Hundreds of firefighters and dozens of fire trucks were all over the street again...
...For a moment I thought everyone had pulled out and left me behind, then I saw some firefighters asleep in their truck...
...A sixty-foot-wide, four-mile-long swath was to be bulldozed out of the forest and from the line the fire crews would "backburn" or "backfire" two miles of forest...
...And pretty soon an enormous wave of flames comes roaring through the forest, exploding in the trees and ripping through the underbrush, destroying everything in its path...
...Nobody talked much about the expected wind shift that would blow the fires down into town, or about firestorms, or about the "safety zone" we were supposed to run to if the fires spread to the south side of town or thefirestorm kicked in...
...The fire from the burnback was expected to hit sometime in the morning...
...Through the acrid haze we caught sight of a dark column of smoke leaning across the sky...
...Mott to play God in Yellowstone has now resulted in the virtual arson of one of America's greatest natural treasures," Kirby said, sputtering with rage...
...His first priority was safeguarding their lives, the second priority was protecting the structures in Silver Gate and Cooke City...
...John and our old pal Billy Rivers arrived to haul out a most valuable piece of property: the freezer...
...Let it burn" seemed to be written in stone, despite the obvious drought conditions...
...Before it hits there is a lull when the trees begin to sway and ash begins to fall, the ash gets larger and larger and pretty soon it seems like a snowstorm and then all of a sudden the ash turns to fire...
...Indeed, the Yellowstone fires seemed to have brought out much of the orneriness—as well as the resourcefulness—of the citizenry, brought out what Frederick Jackson Turner, in his classic work The Significance of the Frontier in American History, called "the striking characteristics" of the American intellect...
...The last of the horses were loaded into the trailer and we gathered together some flashlights, fire extinguishers, and whiskey...
...The damn thing does work, although it's rather unnervingly referred to as "shake and bake...
...Dry branches burst into long arms of sparks and the arms reached forward, touching other trees and turning them to flames...
...Theory and philosophy and reality rarely come together," Hays Kirby said to me as the forest went up in flames outside his door...
...Monday had not been good...
...Commander Liebersbach's intelligence indicated that the front of the Storm Creek fire was too strong to be contained in the park...
...Barbee had been advised as far back as April that they could anticipate the driest year in the history of the Yellowstone ecosystem...
...The firestorm to which we were paying particular attention at the moment was expected to come calling at the front of the Storm Creek fire, which by early September had burned over sixty thousand acres just north and east of Yellowstone and was only one of eight major fires flaring in and around the flagship of the national park system...
...Politics should not intrude on biology...
...Firefighters stood on the steep hill and watched for spotting...
...If they had to pull out, they'd pull out and fight I n Tuesday's chilly dawn, Dave Liebersbach briefed his line officers on a worsening situation...
...I'm not suicidal, but I'm going to be with the last fire truck out of here...
...He pulled out an inhaler and sucked some medication into his lungs...
...John's family had ranched the region for more than two generations...
...It was just too damn dry this year to let things burn...
...Now I understood why the fires couldn't be stopped, why it was far too late for a direct assault...
...Miles and miles and miles—it is all gone...
...All day long black and gray ash fell from the sky and the wind flickered...
...Later that day the fire moved off the road at Cooke Pass and John and Billy rolled into town...
...If the fire came down behind us, it was a two hundred mile drive back around to Cooke—and we had no idea what was in front of us...
...Tim Mahoney of the Sierra Club blithely stated that because of the drought, "these fires are going to get away from you no matter what the policy is...
...Reluctantly, we climbed into Billy's truck...
...A lone bison stood motionless beside Soda Butte Creek...
...That's what people are angry about...
...By the time the officials reversed direction on July 21, it was too late...
...Unbelievable...
...all the other names in this article are the real McCoy...
...Kirby is a tough-talking Air Force pilot and owner of the Grizzly Lodge on the west side of Silver Gate, right next to the forest...
...The winds were calm...
...He was coming back into the mountains with Billy...
...Ash floated around us and the sky 'John and Billy suggested at gunpoint that it might not be in their best interest to have their true names published...
...The contingency line was holding: all the fire was west of the line...
...The smoke was getting to all of us...
...High and far away on the south slope of the mountains, trees flared and died...
...Can you stop a hurricane," someone had said to me days earlier, "can you stop a tidal wave...
...that's part of its charm: if you've made it as far as Cooke, people will leave you alone and you can do what you want...
...We've had enough fires to result in the burning in excess of a million acres," he said...
...Out of the smoking forests would come stories of anger and endurance and widespread destruction...
...It was in late June and I was hiking in the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness near Cooke City with my old friend John Griscomb, a wilderness aficionado and Montana businessman...
...ly tied to the fires, and the cost to the taxpayer is up over $300 million...
...The storm rains fire on the forest...
...If the winds brought fires to both the north and south sides of town, the communities would burn to the ground...
...Forest Service lands into National Park Service lands...
...All that was forecast to happen in the next few days...
...That's what people are angry about...
...One of Alston Chase's recommendations is to separate the Park Service from the Department of Interior and subject its head to Senate confirmation...
...No matter what you do or what that fire does," he said, "every one of you are gonna be heroes, and by God every one of you will be alive when we get done with it...
...The Clover-Mist fire had gone wild, consuming twenty thousand acres in a few hours...
...We turned onto the main road and headed into the night...
...It is all black, it is all gone...
...It looks like a city of flames," Billy said...
...The likelihood that spot fires would ignite the woods around Silver THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 21 another day...
...That night, we took a little jaunt up a closed road to Daisy Pass and caught sight of the perimeter of the Storm Creek fire...
...As drought conditions from 1987 persisted into the spring and early summer of 1988, regional and national Park Service officials remained aloof, unavailable...
...I flew those people into the fire...
...Some people have lost money," he said, "but others have gained because of the fires...
...The evacuation order had been served on Silver Gate, Cooke City, and Cooke Pass...
...Time to go, Johnny...
...The phenomenon of an unofficial 'permanent government' that sets the policy agenda from inside the D.C...
...Fire glowed off in the hills and the wind swayed the trees...
...Now he expected his lodge to go up in smoke...
...Insanity...
...thick smoke prevented an hourly accounting of the fire's progress but the latest infrared photos had not brought good news...
...Many of the firefighters were from outback counties and woodlands similar to Cooke City...
...He probably needed it...
...That's not our fire," he replied, meaning that "officially" the fire had not yet crossed from U.S...
...We were gathered around a big map, the base camp grinding into life around us, steam rising from coffee cups and white lights cutting the slowly lifting darkness...
...I watched the northwest sky, where the orange smoke was thickening...
...Flames hundreds of feet high flash up through the column as unburned gases ignite and ice crystals form at the top...
...An area encompassing a country the size of Denmark...
...If the expected shift to northwest winds arrived, the fires could blow back on the towns...
...That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness...
...For the full story, accessible to the lay reader, see Chase...
...They were his kind of people, after all...
...Seven fatalities have been directMicah Morrison is deputy director of the Committee for the Free World and editor of its monthly publication, Contentions...
...Poor visibility would prevent their return...
...I had been talking with a firefighter...
...Many were firefighting professionals in the year-round employ of the Park Service, the Forest Service, or other government agencies...
...I grabbed it and ran for the road...
...In the middle of the bulldozed line, Indian firefighters leaned on their shovels and watched the blaze...
...The environmental movement, emerging in part from 1960s radicalism, had looked around at the world and arrived at the belief that man could do no good in nature...
...One of them was Dave Liebersbach's burnout...
...Fire-trucks lined the street, men waiting beside them...
...Helicopters flew over the line and dropped incendiary devices called "ping-pong balls" into the forest...
...Gate had increased, and from Silver Gate it could blow right on into Cooke...
...Maybe the best course would be to do nothing at all...
...With conditions so dry, no one was optimistic...
...Kirby had fought Liebersbach on the backburn, arguing for a direct assault on the Storm Creek blaze...
...Yet, as Chase explains, this attitude wrote man out of the wilderness—where in fact the white man, and before him the Indian, had been an important factor for countless centuries...
...Barbee?' " Robert Barbee told the Billings Gazette in mid-August that everything possible was being done to fight the fires...
...A few miles west of the Storm Creek fire, the Hellroaring Creek fire had eaten thirty-four thousand acres and was also moving south...
...She ran off to have a drink...
...The Storm Creek fire continued to hang somewhere northwest of Silver Gate...
...Winds were at thirty-five miles-perhour and were expected to gust as high as fifty miles-per-hour...
...Fifteen-point-two nautical miles across the front...
...He also remarked that the firefighting effort had brought a lot of money to sectors of the regional economy...
...The fires slowed...
...On Sunday, September 11, two inches of snow fell in Yellowstone...
...If the weather turned bad, as was expected, the mountain terrain and high winds would create firestorm conditions and sendthe storm blasting through Silver Gate and Cooke like a blowtorch...
...The fires worried him...
...A decision was made to order the official evacuation of Cooke and Silver Gate and to cut a "contingency line" just west of Silver Gate...
...Cooke City was first called Shoofly and had a brief heyday in the 1880s when mining operations swelled the town to 135 log cabins, two general stores, and thirteen saloons...
...He's got a big gun and knife collection—nothing much else, but he does have that collection...
...The burn-back west of Silver Gate had advanced only a half mile, instead of the needed two miles, because of winds and humidity...
...ooke City, Cooke Pass, and Silver Gate are very small towns, dependent these days on scenic Highway 212 and the tourist trail into Yellowstone, little more than strips of log-cabin-style restaurants and inns and stores tucked into a fold of the high mountains...
...The direction over our national parks is not ours—the decisions are made by lobbyists and environmentalists...
...Barbee said it was a 'small isolated fire.' " Kirby says that he finally was contacted by a film crew, Straight 8, out of Billings, and took them up in a plane to see the fires, despite Yellowstone warnings that he would lose his wings if he did so...
...But it was a gamble: the winds could spot—blow burning embers—across the contingency line and into Silver Gate...
...Goddamn it get the hell out of there," John growled...
...As we talked I noticed that the smoke was getting very thick and the wind was swirling in an odd way...
...Helicopters cut low overhead, trailing huge buckets of water...
...To the north, the Storm Creek fire was moving down...
...In 1972, the Park Service put the "let it burn" policy into effect, "acknowledging," a Park Service document states, "the natural role of fire in sustaining the forests and grasslands of the park...
...Someone had changed the sign on the Second Edition Cafe back to God Be With Us...
...Fire often improves soil composition, opens the way for more diverse vegetation and wildlife, and creates better conditions for existing species...
...The base camp was being pulled back to a safer position...
...Spotting from the burnback landed in the hills on the north side of Silver Gate...
...Storm Creek fire had dropped down into the Soda Butte valley Dave Liebersbach's backburn was the one chance Silver Gate and Cooke City had of surviving...
...Lightning struck Storm Creek on June 14, John told me, and it was still possible to put the fire out...
...It was John...
...Barbee's people—because we couldn't gain access to Mr...
...Top-notch scientific teams analyzed data, measured humidity, gauged weather patterns, fuel dryness, ignition probabilities...
...Kirby had overflown large parts of the Yellowstone area and was infuriated by what he had witnessed...
...Flames skated up the trees with a whoosh of rushing air and a crackle of dry branches...
...They were exiting until the fire danger passed...
...He claims that a team of experts from Alaska came to the area sometime in July to observe the Clover-Mist fire and reported that it was one of the biggest, fastest fires they had ever seen...
...Are you going to tell me that if we have a 'natural fire' that burns this valley up this year, and we have a `natural fire' that burns this valley up next year—what's to assure us that we're not going to have another 'natural fire' that will burn our town, and our livelihood, and our dreams, and our heritage...
...When we reached John's ranch, I told them what I knew about the Storm Creek fire...
...That's it," John's brother said, "we've got to go...
...It was, in short, one unholy son of a bitch, and it was headed our way...
...Old Glory flew all over town...
...This would deprive the fire of fuel and, it was hoped, either contain it or divert it away from the towns...
...If the southwest winds held and the fires blew in, it might be possible to keep the fires away from the south side of the towns and hold them north of the freshly cut bulldozer lines...
...Do you know how big that 'small isolated fire' was...
...A fully staffed base camp, home to firefighters, military personnel called in to assist, and support teams, had been set up in the Cooke Pass area...
...Micah Morrison WHILE YELLOWSTONE BURNED A survivor of this summer's fires reports that only Washington bureaucrats and environmentalists could have concocted a "let it burn" policy during a time of drought...
...I could make out these characteristics in the firefighters too...
...I ran back to the phone...
...Over at the Second Edition Cafe, someone had changed the sign from God Be With Us to Dog Be With Us...
...others came from as far away as New Jersey and California...
...A mile or two down into the valley, the forest was burning, flames climbed a hundred feet and more up over the trees and flicked at the sky...
...All the Yellowstone fires would still be burning...
...How can you justify that level of judgment...
...I can't believe this is happening," Billy said...
...That's more timber than most countries in Europe have...
...To allow Mr...
...that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients...
...If this doesn't work, it's hand-to-hand combat in downtown Cooke...
...Later, a fire mushroomed east of Cooke City, toward Cooke Pass...
...Although Chase's book does not focus at length on fire policy, it pinpoints the problems in the theoretical world supporting the governance of national park and wilderness lands...
...Barbee—and begged them, `Please stop this fire.' Mr...
...At last report, more than four million acres have been burned—two million alone in Alaska—and thirty thousand firefighters have battled the blazes...
...A deathly haze and stillness hung over it...
...Its column can rise, he said, 4s high as fifty thousand feet...
...Barbee out here," one old codger said to me, "and I'll shoot him for you...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
