By mid-December, the Elk Fire that had raged across the eastern face of the Bighorn Mountains in northern Wyoming had been 100% contained for a month. That’s when photographer Tim Doolin flew a drone over the fire’s burn area to get an aerial perspective of the aftermath of the late-season wildfire that nearly burned the small nearby towns of Dayton and Parkman.
What Dooling saw from above was disheartening.
“The portion of the forest between Horse Creek, on the edge of Tongue River Canyon, all the way to Wolf Creek above the famed Eatons’ Ranch, was gone,” he said. “The fire burnt everything. It was complete and total.”
Between late September and early November, the Elk Creek Fire burned 98,352 acres of pine forests until it was fully contained and knocked down, thanks to a change in weather and the valiant efforts of about 1,000 firefighters and support personnel.
Doolin frequently hiked through the section of the Bighorns that’s been transformed into an immense barren scar. He fears he’ll never be able to hike through those familiar forests again.
“I have hiked extensively in the area, year after year after year, and I don’t think it will regenerate in my lifetime,” he said. “I was pretty devastated by what I saw.”
While the aftermath appears bleak, wildfire experts who have looked over the area say there are reasons to hope. As bad as the Elk Creek Fire was, the aftermath reveals that it might not have been as devastating as it seems.
Mosaic Melancholy
Wildfires are complex systems that constantly change and frustrate efforts to contain and extinguish them. The spread of the Elk Creek Fire was aided by persistently dry weather and Wyoming's notoriously windy conditions.
The most concerning thing Doolin saw during his drone flight was the vast scope of the fire’s destruction. The landscape he observed looked like a wasteland — utterly devastated and devoid of any encouraging signs.
“We had relatively healthy timber in the Bighorns, and yet it just burnt,” he said. “There were very few living trees of any sort in the area. That portion of the fire did not burn as a mosaic. It burnt everything.”
Mosaics result from the unpredictable behavior of raging wildfires. Intense flames can destroy hundreds of square miles of grass and timber while leaving smaller areas within their path unaffected.
Doolin looked for mosaics in the section of the Bighorns he observed from the sky. He didn’t find any, which made the aftermath more disheartening.
“There was a little bit of a mosaic above the Elephant's Foot and the Horseshoe Ranch, but not a lot,” he said. “Much of the area I saw was scorched.”
Fire is essential to many of Wyoming’s forest ecosystems. The pinecones of several conifers won’t open unless exposed to the intense heat that can only be generated by a wildfire.
Doolin acknowledged the vital role of fire in the Bighorns. Based on his observations, he is concerned that the Elk Creek Fire burned so intensely that it might have delayed or outright prevented the natural cycle that fire is supposed to initiate.
“It’s necessary for those cones to heat up, release the seeds and reseed the burned portion,” he said. “I don't know if that will happen because of how much the timber was burned.”
Light In The Darkness
Jeff Barron, fire chief for the Tongue River Fire District-Ranchester, doesn’t need to be reminded of the intensity of the Elk Creek Fire. He was on the scene as the flames defied the firefighters and kept spreading across the eastern face of the Bighorns.
However, his perspective has changed in the weeks since it stopped raging. He told Cowboy State Daily about the initial results of the U.S. Forest Service’s Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) team's evaluation of the affected acreage.
“They assembled a team of experts to go through the burned area and look at the fire scar,” he said. “They evaluated the face, looked at a lot of photography, and then ground truthed in areas they could access.”
Barron said the BAER team’s findings were surprisingly optimistic. Despite the furious flames and blackened aftermath, the Elk Creek Fire wasn’t as devastating as it appeared.
“The fire didn’t have much residence time,” he said. “That means the flames didn’t have time to penetrate the organic layers in the soil.”
Barron said the BAER team left the devastated area with optimistic impressions. While the fire’s impact across the nearly 100,000-acre expanses varied, the overall assessment suggested that it didn’t burn deep enough to affect the area's future ecological health.
“Some areas didn't burn, some areas burned to some severity, and some areas burned with a great deal of severity, but that heat didn’t stick around long enough to take away the organic mass underneath the surface,” Barron said.
Instigation And Prevention
Ironically, the same force that increased the severity of the Elk Creek Fire also prevented it from causing more devastation. Wyoming’s wind fanned and spread the flames quickly, keeping them at surface level and forcing them to move rather than stay and simmer.
“The fire didn’t have the time to sit and cook the forest floor,” Barron said. “When a forest fire can stay in an area, it can burn into the trees' roots and trail through them. That’s when you lose much of the organic matter under the soil.”
Once the Elk Creek Fire burned through a forested area in the Bighorns, the force of the wind spread the flames further into the trees. The fire burned everything on the surface so there was nothing left that would catch fire again.
Barron said that makes a tremendous difference in the long-term recovery of the Bighorn pine forests. The wind definitely made the fire worse, but also prevented it from becoming much worse.
“A lot of the high organics burned, but there was no way for the fire to come back and do anything else,” he said. “It burned and moved on.”
Road To Recovery
It will take a while for the Bighorns to return to how they were before the Elk Creek Fire. It’s difficult to say how long it will take, but a trip to Yellowstone National Park can provide some insight.
Barron compared the future recovery of the Bighorn pine forests to the ongoing recovery in Yellowstone after the 1988 fire season, when more than 793,000 acres — around 36% of the park — burned in dozens of separate fires.
“It took decades for those forests to recover, and it's still healing,” he said. “Some portions of Yellowstone still haven't returned to what they were before, but the trees are slowly reestablishing themselves.”
The more pressing concerns are the short-term impacts caused by wildfires.
The charred surface of the fire scar could be a source of landslides during the spring runoff, especially in areas where the subsurface was partially burned. Furthermore, the empty expanse could become a foothold for fast-growing invasive plants, complicating or preventing slower-growing native plants from re-establishing themselves.
Some mitigation efforts are already underway.
Sheridan County is working to install precipitation gauges in the affected area, which will provide five-minute updates on the amount of rain and runoff in the Bighorns, hopefully serving as an early warning for potential landslides.
Fire lines established to stop the spread of the Elk Creek Fire were dug down to the mineral soil, removing the organic layers that would fuel the fire. Barron said the U.S. Forest Service regraded and restored several fire lines before the snow started falling, ensuring the soil would be fertile in spring.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service will monitor the area for invasive plants so they can remove them before they take over the fire scar. This will give native vegetation the best chance to reestablish and recover.
“The primary goal will be ensuring that the native grasses and understory plants return,” Barron said. “When they’re reestablished, the native trees will follow them.”
Fire And Life
Many people find the loss of the pine forests in the Bighorns tragic, but a deeper look into the aftermath of the Elk Creek Fire has provided plenty of encouragement for the future.
“I had a nice conversation with a lady who donated some materials to our firefighters,” Barron said. “She was snowshoeing in the Bighorns and saw areas of the forest that were untouched by the fire. She told me she had a new appreciation for the cycle of life after a fire and how it's not as devastating as one might seem.”
The Bighorns' forests might take a generation or two to return to their former grandeur, but the foundation remains largely untouched and ready to grow. Barron said that while the Elk Creek Fire was dangerous and devastating, the worst-case scenarios were avoided.
“Fires can be pretty intimidating,” he said. “The Elk Creek Fire was big, and the smoke and the flames looked scary, but they didn’t penetrate the ground. Dense groves of pine trees tend to take longer to grow, but with 20 years of good spacing and sunlight, we might see the Bighorns back to where they were.”
Contact Andrew Rossi at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com
The small, rural Wyoming town of Dayton can only watch and pray as the Elk Fire burns across the mountain face of the Bighorns above. (Photo by Chad Flanagan, Lifelong Dayton Resident) 
Wyoming photographer recently flew a drone over an area burned by the Elk Fire, Steamboat Rock and the Turkey Creek area of Tongue River Canyon. "The change is dramatic, stark, devastating," Doolin said in a post showing video of the area. (Courtesy Tom Doolin) 
The small, rural Wyoming town of Dayton could only watch and pray as the Elk Fire burns across the mountain face of the Bighorns above in this October 2024 file photo. (Photo by Chad Flanagan, Lifelong Dayton Resident) 
Wyoming photographer recently flew a drone over an area burned by the Elk Fire, Steamboat Rock and the Turkey Creek area of Tongue River Canyon. "The change is dramatic, stark, devastating," Doolin said in a post showing video of the area. (Courtesy Tom Doolin) 
Firefighters are nearby to fight the Elk Fire all around its perimiter and interior, where accessible. (Tongue River Fire District-Ranchester Fire)
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
