Nothing makes us denizens of the Big Empty more nervous than a wildfire that we can’t put out. It reminds us of our tenuous place in the natural order of things.
This year’s persistent fires near Dubois and Dayton call up memories of 1988 for me. Maybe for you too, if you can remember brushing ash off the windshield of your car in Cheyenne as Yellowstone burned.
The Yellowstone fire complex was international news back in the day. Folks all over the globe hold Yellowstone dear, even if they’ve only heard about it, because it’s such a weird, magnificent place.
The first white guy to visit Yellowstone, John Colter, was chased naked by Indians through the surreal landscape, dodging geysers, waterfalls and boiling mud pots He emerged wild-eyed to tell the world about what he saw, and nobody believed him.
I was working in Governor Sullivan’s office when the Park caught fire in ‘88. As the news spread around the country, it caused the same sort of visceral reaction among folks. Yellowstone was on fire!
Lots of factors contributed to the difficulty in dealing with a national park and adjacent wilderness areas burning. Not least among them were the legal restrictions on the use of bulldozers and motorized equipment. That allowed any small lightning strike to grow into a great conflagration.
Another unique problem was a high-altitude tornado that had hit the Bridger Wilderness a couple of years prior. This created a wind-throw, or a bunch of downed trees that looked like a gargantuan game of pick-up-sticks when viewed from a helicopter.
The stack of dead timber was 30 feet deep, zillions of board feet of tinder-dry wood just waiting for one of the fires to reach it. When the Clover Mist Fire finally set the whole shebang off, it sent a smoke plume 75,000 feet into the stratosphere. The smoke cloud created its own high altitude weather system, with lightning and all.
So yeah, the pucker factor was off the charts in ‘88.
As the news from Yellowstone became bleaker and bleaker, the governor’s office set up a hot line (no pun intended) to keep citizens apprised of the fires’ behavior and firefighting efforts. Concerned citizens also took advantage of the hot line to pass along helpful tips about how to extinguish the inferno.
One nice lady said that, when her bacon grease caught fire on her stove, she merely tossed baking soda on it and, voila, no more fire. She observed that the trona deposits near Green River were really just huge baking soda mines, so we should simply load up a bunch of Air Guard C-130s with trona and dump the stuff over the park.
A gentleman from Cheyenne offered a more aggressive approach. He pointed out, and rightly so, that we have a whole bunch of nuclear warheads around Cheyenne. Why not just explode a small, tactical nuke above the fire and suck all the oxygen out of it, sorta like an oil well fire is extinguished? Problem solved!
Chatter on the hot line also delved into the causes of the fires. Government ineptitude was most often mentioned.
However, the timing of the fires was also a topic. It was conjectured that God was not pleased because the fires began on Marie Osmond’s wedding night, and her virtue was a sacred thing in divine eyes.
A baseball fan concluded that the fires began the same night as the first game under the lights at Wrigley Field. God is, as everyone knows, a Cubs fan and wanted their games played in daylight, so She was not pleased.
And here we are, decades after the Yellowstone fires, confronted once again with a natural event that humans can’t control. It would seem that this lesson is the hardest one for us to learn.
Although it must be pointed out that the Cubs won a World Series in 2016 and Marie Osmond is still hot as hell.
Rod Miller can be reached at: RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
