“The soil was not sterilized by this hottest of fires, and it hasn't become a meadow,” Despain told a group of journalists and researchers who visited the site last May. That's because only a decade after the fires, the charred ground beyond the sign has already yielded up a sparse forest of knee- to shoulder-height pines. Today, however, Despain, who is now with the US Geological Survey (USGS), can wear an I-told-you-so smile as he points out the sign to visitors. According to Despain, the sign reflects the still-pervasive myth that forest fires often “sterilize” soils. That sign went up against the advice of Don Despain, then a park service biologist and one of the architects of Yellowstone's “natural fire” policy, which mandates fighting fires only when they threaten lives or property. At the end of the walk, an interpretive sign tells of the blowdown and the subsequent wildfires and proclaims: “After two consecutive deforestations, this site can still reseed with grasses and shrubs, but it may remain a meadow for decades.” The result was a scene so desolate that a network television crew chose it as the backdrop to declare Yellowstone's “legacy in ashes.”Ī few years later, the park service built a wooden boardwalk across the blackened ground at that site atop the Solfatara Plateau above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. In the notorious summer of 1988, when wildfires burned one-third of the park, a fire front swept across the same ridge, incinerating everything under four inches in diameter and charring the rest. Atop a ridge in Yellowstone National Park in 1984, a freak summer wind-perhaps a tornado or a downburst from a thunderstorm-leveled an ancient lodge-pole pine forest, piling up a head-high maze of logs.
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