DISCOVER
Twice burned, forever shaped The Maple Fire, a lightning-caused fire that raged during the summer of 2016, burned approximately 52,000 acres. PHOTO BY CHARISSA REID / NPS
YELLOWSTONE’S EVOLVING FIRE STRATEGY BY JESSIANNE CASTLE
Becky Smith remembers the fires of 1988 that burned 793,880 acres of Yellowstone National Park. Then eight years old, Smith was on a family trip in her grandmother’s box-van during the first days after the park reopened to the public following the burn. “I was really awestruck,” she said. “I had never seen more than a campfire or a burning ditch. I thought the helicopters were really cool, along with seeing the flames on a hillside with elk grazing below. “I don’t ever remember being scared while in the park, even though I remember seeing flames close to the roads and boardwalks,” she added. “It was a memorable experience for a young girl from North Dakota who had never been to Yellowstone, or even the mountains.” Thirty years later, Smith serves as Yellowstone’s wildland fire ecologist. Having completed a degree in natural resource management at the University of Minnesota, Crookston,
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she says she’s often wondered about the impact her experience in ’88 had on her choice of profession. Smith said she wasn’t surprised when she got the call in 2016, alerting her about a lightning-started fire burning near the western boundary. What did startle her though was the location. “I was surprised the meadows burned. Usually they don’t burn in the park,” she said. “It tells me how dry it was that year.” In 2016, 22 fires covered more than 70,000 park acres, becoming the most active fire year since ’88, while the fire in question, known as the Maple Fire, torched approximately 52,000 acres. Standing in the overlap of the ’88 and 2016 fire scars in July 2018, Smith gestured to the charred knobs that were once 28-year-old lodgepole pines. She pointed to red shadows on a darkened soil, indications of where large logs burned at high severity and left nothing behind.
