Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The fire closely threatened Old Faithful Village.
Study of fire frequency in Yellowstone has revealed that fires with the intensity of these
have occurred only once in every three hundred years. The causes were a very unusual
combination of drought, dry storm fronts bringing lightning and high winds, and long-
term buildup of fuel.
After the 1988 fires were out—with the snows of early September—a careful census
was made of the wildlife whose lives had been lost. Surprisingly, very few large animals
perished. Less than 1 percent of the elk in Yellowstone that summer died—about 250 of
32,000. The one species that has become rarer is the moose, which suffered due to the de-
cline of old-growth forest.
Positive results from the 1988 fires continue to be discovered. Wildflowers flourished,
especially in the first few subsequent years, since the fire killed almost none of the plant
parts underground. The fires opened up distant vistas visitors could not see before. Fire
specialists know that smaller wildfires will continue to proliferate in our climate-changed
future, and prescribed fires are periodically ignited to reduce fuel buildup.
Most animals continued their lives unaffected. As John D. Varley and Paul Schullery
concluded in evaluating the effect of the fires on Yellowstone's fish: “Wildland … has all
the time in the world to regenerate and maintain itself. It scars and heals itself on a scale of
centuries, and with no regard for the much briefer scale of a human lifespan.”
