Greetings from Yellowstone National Park

A good book about the great Yellowstone fire of 1988 is The Fires of ’88, by Ross W. Simpson, an award winning network radio correspondent with the Mutual Broadcasting System who is used to logging (no pun intended) huge miles to cover stories all over the world. He was there covering the fire with 3,000 other reporters, cameramen, and photographers. It was one of the books I brought with me, and I read every word.

It was the first great Yellowstone fire since 1750. Some say fires are a natural part of the long term ecology of the forest, but this was a colossal catastrophe in many respects. The foresters of the National Park Service had never culled old and dead trees and suppressed fires for decades, which made the fire unstoppable when it did start. It kept burning until it was put out by the snowfalls of September 1988. The vast majority of trees in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem are lodgepole pine. It is too cold for the other great western conifer, the Ponderosa Pine.

In 1988 many trees were dead or dying, some killed by beetles. These would have been perfectly good trees to harvest for telephone poles or to make log cabins. It is called the lodgepole pine because it is so tall and straight, with just the right thickness. Instead, all that great timber was burned and destroyed. What a terrible waste of a great natural resource.

The park still had a lot of recovery to do when I went to Yellowstone in June of 2009 with a De Paul University class and the Walker family. Kelly is the professor, Dave her husband, Kailey and Kelly Jane their daughters. The last time she taught a class on the ecology of Yellowstone was in June of 2004 when we drove out there to vacation with her family while she was with the students. Dave invited me to hang out with him and the girls like we did in 2004.

United Air Lines had one flight a day at 10:20 AM nonstop from O’Hare to Jackson Hole. Dave and the girls were there to meet me with their rental car, a big Chevy SUV. I asked Dave to stop at a liquor store so that I could stock up on beer for the week. After a few hours of shopping in the tourist stores in downtown Jackson we met the DePaul class at a barbeque restaurant for dinner. The class was traveling in a chartered bus, and I sat with Steve, the bus driver. A little older than me, he was a Mormon from Idaho. I spent a lot of time with him that week because we were the two outsiders. He was the first Mormon I ever met, and just the nicest man you would ever want to meet.

This time I would be staying inside the park every night except the last one, when we all had motel rooms in Jackson so we could fly out in the morning. We were going to be staying that night at the Old Faithful Lodge, a huge, century old wooden building close to the geyser itself. The vaulted ceiling in the huge lobby was really something. I had brought a handful of books about the Rocky Mountain West in general or Yellowstone in particular, and the one I spent the most time reading was The Angry West, by former Colorado governor Richard Lamm. It was written in the late 1970’s when President Carter had vetoed some dams in western states. It was about the culture and history of the sparsely populated and arid west, how the rest of the country just doesn’t understand.

The second day Dave’s SUV followed the bus to Lake Yellowstone and we all went on a boat cruise. That night we stayed in cabins near canyon lands. We all ate supper in a cafeteria next to the cabins. The park had outsourced the services, everything but the park rangers themselves, to a management firm. Their employees, mostly college students, were from all over the world, and wore name tags listing where they were from.

I had brought a handful of week old Wall Street Journal and New York Times newspapers, and a few year old Foreign Affairs magazines the Elmhurst Public Library had withdrawn and sold. The coed (A word that my college age daughter will not allow me to use) that was ringing up my cafeteria dinner saw the Foreign Affairs magazine I had brought with me to read while eating, and she was just thrilled to see it, explaining that, while it is truly a wonderful summer job, they are cut off from the outside world, she craves news from the outside world, and loves Foreign Affairs magazine. I gave it to her, saying that it means a lot more to her than it does to me. I did make her promise to give it to someone else after she reads every word.

The next two nights we had cabins near Roosevelt Lodge. We would eat our meals in its restaurant. The last night everyone went out for a chuck wagon dinner except Steve and I, who had dinner together. We had a really good theological discussion, and it didn’t seem that there were any meaningful differences between his Mormon and my Catholic faith. His Bible has the exact same words that mine does.

I gave all my remaining newspapers to the appreciative staff as we left. Smart phones can’t bring in the world when you can’t get a signal.

The next day we were at Mammoth Hot Springs for over an hour. One of the park’s most impressive geothermal features, there was a constant stream of cars stopping for five minutes to marvel at the sight.

The park rangers gave talks to the class every day, and I was always in the audience. Being with this college class I saw and heard a lot more than an average tourist would have.

The burned out trees were all still there 21 years later. Most of them were still standing, but some had been blown down by the fierce winds created by the fire.

Fortunately, in only 22,000 acres (one percent of the park) was the ground scorched so badly that it could not renew itself. In the rest of the burned area either the heat melted the seeds out of the pine cones to germinate a new generation of trees, or the grassland fires did not burn down into the root systems.

In 2009 the burned areas had saplings coming up in the midst of the charred timber. The park’s sagebrush and grasses grew back, with no evidence of the destruction that had been visited.

In June of 2009 the climate could not have been more different than the record drought of 1988. It rained almost every day we were there, and there was still a lot of snow in the woods in elevations above 7,500 or 8,000 feet, and a lot more snowcapped mountains than there usually is by mid June, which means there was either more snow than usual this past winter, or the spring was colder than usual, or both.

The whole park seemed to be waterlogged, with standing water everywhere. Downed trees were rotting, returning the nutrients to the soil. There has been news of a historic multiyear drought in the West, but somehow the greater Yellowstone/Grand Teton area has been spared.

I kept track of all the out of state license plates I saw. It kept my memory busy and out of trouble. I saw two plates from Hawaii (!?) and several Canadian provinces. The only state I didn’t see was Rhode Island. That is odd, because there are seven states, plus DC, with fewer people, and I saw plates from all of those.

There is no substitute for staying inside the park, and I saw a lot that I didn’t see in 2004, but I still never got to hike into the back country. Leaving the trappings of civilization behind and hiking deep into the Yellowstone wilderness is still on my bucket list.

The college students took many digital photos of plants. These need to be cataloged and described. It will be interesting to have next year’s class compare what plants they will find to see how the wet years are changing the ecology. For example, sagebrush is a common plant of the West because it can survive the intense Summer sunlight and doesn’t need a lot of water. Is the sagebrush going to survive under the shade of bigger, thirstier bushes, trees, and tall grasses? And, what is going to happen to the new ecology when the drought years return?

Sincerely,
David