Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [29]
“When.”
He figured Garrett had the experience to be a reasonable judge.
“Next week we’re bringing in the experts at predicting fire behavior.” Garrett removed his cap and mopped his head with a bandanna. “But you mark my words.” He swept his arm to encompass the pine-studded plateau. “If we don’t get rain soon, all this will look like that.”
He pointed to the smoking ruin of Roaring Mountain.
Steve chewed on that while he made it to the place he’d planned to show the visitors.
“Are you ready for your fifteen minutes of fame?” Superintendent King asked with a flash of smile.
Through his now-throbbing headache, Steve grinned back. Park HQ at Mammoth was a small town and he knew Tom King well.
Stepping into the middle of a clearing on the backside of Roaring Mountain, Steve waited while the press fanned out. Secretary Mason wore an attentive look on his hawklike face.
Raising his voice for the crowd, Steve began, “Nine years ago, a lightning strike started a fire here.” Long trunks of the fallen lay scattered, and a few silver ghosts still stood, having weathered the weight of snows and the ravage of high winds.
“It looks like hell to me.” The heckler seemed to be part of the press.
“We call these doghair thickets.” Steve pointed to patches of seedlings that grew cheek by jowl. “It takes a fire to open the cones of the lodgepole and release the seeds. When it happens, every hundred to four hundred years, many thousands of small trees grow back right away.”
“Who’d want to vacation here, though?”
Steve saw him this time, the ponytailed cameraman from Billings.
“Many burned areas don’t look this bad,” Steve tried. “Often the debris on the forest floor smoulders slowly, leaving the mature trees with damage only to the lower branches, like over here.”
There was no response from either the press or the visiting entourage. So, how many laymen were interested in listening to a biologist blather?
Steve faced the crowd squarely. “What’s at stake in Yellowstone this summer is a basic question of how to manage wildfire. In the northern Rockies, the climate is too dry and cold for decomposition, so the fuels continue to build until there’s a fire. After nearly a century of suppression, in 1972 the park decided to manage its resources differently. That meant no putting out natural fires, those started by lightning.”
“So what happened?” Carol Leeds from Billings asked.
“Very little.” He gestured toward the burn he’d been showing them. “Between 1972 and 1987 around thirty-four thousand acres, or less than three percent of the park was renewed. Until this summer.”
“I believe that this morning’s report tallied over eighty-eight thousand acres,” Garrett Anderson spoke up.
As Steve started to lead the way to another section, he noticed that the Secretary of the Interior seemed most impressed with this last statistic.
Three hours later in Mammoth, Steve opened the basement door into the Yellowstone Park archives. Upstairs, in the stone headquarters building that had once been Fort Yellowstone’s bachelor officers’ quarters, tourists studied exhibits of old uniforms and weapons.
“Everybody buy your story about fire being natural, like granola and alfalfa sprouts?” Walt Leighton asked from inside his office.
“What do you think?” Steve shut the door harder than he’d intended.
Walt, the park historian, uncoiled his long frame. He came out of his closet-sized office into the main room lined with filing cabinets. “I’d say the important thing is whether Randolph Mason bought it.” His bushy brows knit above his narrow nose.
Steve leaned against a table topped by a microfiche reader and looked up at Walt, who was easily six-four against his own five-ten. “What can Mason do? Superintendent King decided days ago that this season’s fires would not be allowed to burn free.”
“The Secretary of the Interior can change policy for the long term.” Steve recognized Harriet Friendswood’s voice and turned.
She came out of the back room where historic documents were stored. Meticulously, she stripped