Springtime in The Rockies

By Paul A. Witteman

Across a parcel of scorched landscape, a pair of male ground squirrels are enacting an annual ritual. Chirping madly, the rivals dash at each other, tails raised, seeking to establish hegemony over the turf that will become a summer home for mate and offspring. The battle is fierce but short; the loser scuttles off into the sagebrush. The victor preens on hind legs, surveying a domain where shoots of bluebunch wheatgrass, Idaho fescue and larkspur have begun to sprout. It is springtime in the Rockies, and Yellowstone National Park is emerging from hibernation -- and recovering from the most troubled time in its 117-year history.

The last vision of Yellowstone most people carried into winter was far less bucolic. It was an image of immense walls of flame thundering across the canopy of lodgepole pine forests, leaping entire ridgelines in a searing specter of natural destruction that mocked man's effort to contain it. The fires of 1988 appeared to be an environmental Armageddon. "If you looked at the fire storms, you would have thought that nothing would have survived," says Ed Lewis, executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an ecological watchdog group.

Yet Yellowstone still lives and is as wondrous as ever. Every 78 minutes or so, Old Faithful clears its throat and sends its geyser spumes as much as 180 ft. into the sky, just as it always has. Bison and elk graze side by side on Swan Lake Flats, and the evening chorus of coyotes calling one another to the hunt echoes hauntingly again across canyons. And soon the RVs, the Conestoga wagons of the late 20th century, will be circling up in campgrounds during summer evenings.

Nevertheless, visitors will see a park that is dramatically different from a year ago. The fires consumed 989,000 of Yellowstone's 2.2 million acres, less than originally thought but still an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. But the flames were dervish-like, capriciously carving jigsaw patterns out of untouched forest, sometimes encircled by heavily burned areas. Blackened stands of lodgepole pine and Douglas fir should gradually become meadows of aspens, wildflowers and grass; life will go on. "From an ecological standpoint, there was no downside," says John Varley, the park's chief of research. "It is not a rebirth because there was not a death."

Varley's view, which hews to a National Park Service doctrine dating to 1963, postulates that nature, not man, should be allowed to deal most of the cards in Yellowstone. Fires naturally started by lightning strikes have been left to burn in the park since 1972 unless they have seriously threatened lives or property. In the 16 years before last summer, there had been 233 such fires, which consumed a modest 34,157 acres. But the policy became increasingly controversial last July and August as the fires and smoke repeatedly drove tourists from the park. This, in turn, made federal officials in Washington as skittish as yellow-bellied marmots on the lookout for hungry eagles.

A review of fire-management policy was ordered by then Interior Secretary Donald Hodel. The resulting report was a muddled exercise in self- contradiction. Its authors confirmed that the ecological results of natural burning are good. But the report contended that "in some cases the social and economic effects ((of natural fires)) may be unacceptable." Translation: the main problem with the fires was not what they did to plant and animal life but what they did to the tourist business.

Yellowstone has 2.4 million visitors each year, who spend some $43 million inside park boundaries alone. Says Bill Schilling, executive director of the Wyoming Heritage Foundation, a business-backed lobbying group: "Yellowstone is Wyoming's crown jewel. Tourism was seriously impacted throughout the state." Responding to pressure from business interests in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, the Interior Department has decreed that this year every fire in Yellowstone started by natural means, as well as by human carelessness, will be strenuously suppressed.

Though the fiery summer of 1988 scared away tourists, it had relatively little impact on Yellowstone's animals, compared with the normal rigors of winter. The fires killed only 335 of the 31,000-member elk herd. But a harsh winter eliminated almost 5,000 more, and their carcasses lie in various states of decomposition throughout the park.

Yellowstone's herd of 2,700 bison was reduced more by a highly controversial hunt last fall and winter just outside the park (570 killed) and harsh weather (260) than by the fire (9). Yellowstone's best-known residents, 200 or so grizzlies, may have been reduced by a total of two as a result of the conflagrations. A pair of bears that had been tagged with radio transmitters could not be located during the winter. Says Assistant Chief Ranger Gary Brown: "The bears don't seem to be frightened by fire. Poaching is a bigger threat by a long shot." The grizzlies will, however, find it more difficult to locate a crucial source of prehibernation protein, the whitebark pine nut. Though less than 20% of the whitebark pine trees in the park were burned, some scientists feel that a larger percentage of trees of nut-bearing age were killed. A shortage of the nuts could drive bears from higher altitudes this fall -- and into more confrontations with humans.

Of the 1,000 or so species of floras in the park, lodgepole pine and the duff from its fallen needles and branches provided most of the fuel for the fires. But nature has provided the tree with a way to make a comeback. Some lodgepole pinecones are serotinous: they open and release seeds only when activated by the heat generated by fires. In some areas surveyed by Yellowstone biologists, seed densities from such cone releases measure in the millions per acre. As a result, the ground will soon be thick with pine sprouts.

The best news for the plants is that much of the park's soil seems to have been merely singed. The charred area in some places is only a fraction of an inch deep, leaving root systems intact. Compared with Mount St. Helens, where the 1980 eruption left the side of the mountain without soil, Yellowstone was fortunate.

In fact, many experts believe more of Yellowstone should be burned more regularly. Alston Chase, author of the book Playing God in Yellowstone, points out that in the hundreds of years that Indians lived and hunted in the area, they set fires that helped create the park's landscape. The burned, mature forests gave way to grassy meadows filled with willows and aspens, which in turn supported more plants and wildlife. Yellowstone's current guardians, Chase contends, should do the same as the Indians. "We can't wait for lightning to strike," he says. "It's better to have lots of small fires than one big one. I fear we may have locked Yellowstone into a boom-or-bust cycle, with big conflagrations at long intervals."

Last year's fires have rekindled an old debate over Yellowstone's future. There is growing awareness that the park is integrally related to an area far beyond its boundaries. The headwaters of three river systems that feed into the Colorado, Columbia and Missouri all originate within Yellowstone. The geysers and other geothermal features, all linked by underground "plumbing," extend beyond the park's borders. And Yellowstone's four-legged residents roam onto adjacent ranchland and national-forest territory irrespective of lines on maps. The Greater Yellowstone Coalition contends that the park is the centerpiece of interdependent land that covers almost 14 million acres in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Says Executive Director Lewis: "It is one of the last wild-land ecosystems remaining in the temperate zone in the world." Environmentalists like Lewis believe that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, as they prefer to call it, should be kept as natural as possible.

That does not sit well with snowmobilers, ranchers, miners, hunters and people who want to tap into geothermal power. Or Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. "We tire of people telling us all those things we ought to do," he says. Those who want to use the land for purposes other than watching buffalo roam see the Greater Yellowstone arguments as efforts to encroach on their ability to use land they consider their backyard. Says the Wyoming Heritage Society's Schilling: "We find the argument to be specious, undocumented and emotionally charged."

The debate is heated and will get hotter still. "Yellowstone has a symbolic aura," says Park Superintendent Robert Barbee. "It is one of America's icons." However, the park's future is caught between competing forces. Says Montana rancher Len Sargent, whose 2,000-acre spread abuts both Yellowstone and the adjacent national forest: "It's frustrating to see decisions based on politics, not biology." But politics, not biology, is what is practiced in Washington and state capitals, where Yellowstone's fate will be shaped more permanently than any series of wildfires ever succeed in doing.