In Yellowstone, America’s 'First Water Park,' Decades-Old Blaze Marked Start Of Megafire Era

Speaker 1: 00:00 In the summer of 1988, Yellowstone national park was engulfed in flames. After the fire was extinguished, plenty of thorny questions remained. What did those fires mean for the parks near pristine rivers and lakes? Today, we start a series taking a closer look at where water and fire intersect across the West from K H O L Robin Vincent reports from Jackson, Wyoming, Speaker 2: 00:30 National park service hydrologist. Erin white is at Kepler cascades where whitewater plunges 150 feet into the fire whole river. The multi-tiered waterfall is flanked by a sea of mature lodgepole pine trees dotted in between our young trees that sprouted after the 1988 fires. Speaker 3: 00:50 See it's the variation and the landscape and the types of environments that were affected Speaker 2: 00:54 The 1988 Yellowstone fires torched more than a third of the park and touched nearly all of its landscapes in some way. That meant Speaker 3: 01:03 Very few watersheds and Yellowstone were not impacted Speaker 2: 01:06 White lakes to call Yellowstone America's first water park. It's home to the headwaters of multiple major rivers and hundreds of waterfalls. Thousands of geysers, mud pots, and hot Springs, gush bubble, and boil here too, because the 1988 fires focus the nation's attention on wildfire for months. Soon after scientists descended on the park to study the impacts, what they found reflects the fires legacy of renewal, small streams were affected in the short term with ashy runoff, but big bodies of water showed little change in water quality that resilience proved important back then saving and then recovering watersheds wasn't top of mind for overwhelmed fire managers, human built infrastructure was the priority. Speaker 3: 01:58 I think those wildfires raging in the area of Yellowstone national park shown Speaker 4: 02:02 Very quickly. It became apparent that we did not have and could not have the resources to contain the fires. Despite the best efforts of thousands of firefighters, Speaker 2: 02:16 Steve fry, a former incident commander, he and his team were laser-focused on protecting three things, Speaker 4: 02:23 Firefighters, the public and those iconic developments within the park Speaker 2: 02:30 Cons like the historic old faithful in built in 1903, former Yellowstone historian Lee Whittlesey was a law enforcement ranger at the time. Speaker 4: 02:40 Old faithful is surrounded by fires on all sides. And I remember just being amazed that everywhere I looked for 360 degrees, I saw fire Speaker 2: 02:51 For incident commander fry, the fires signaled a paradigm shift. They ushered in a new chapter of massive frequent fires that communities across the West face today. And they expanded our understanding of wildfires vital ecological Speaker 4: 03:09 Process. It was may of us, my land, fire management, something that we had never experienced before, but the magnitude and the fire behavior, we have experienced a number of times since Speaker 2: 03:24 The subtext here is climate change. It's fueling longer, more intense fire seasons, Montana state university, paleo ecologists, Cathy Whitlock studies, how climate influences fire. She was in Yellowstone in the summer of 88, but she wasn't there for the fires. Whitlock was examining the history of the parks plants and the fires were simply a nuisance. Speaker 4: 03:48 I hadn't really even thought about fire as being something worthy of attention because there hadn't been fires in Yellowstone for a long time. Speaker 2: 03:56 In the end, the fires refocused her career. She pioneered a way to trace back fire history. Thousands of years, using charcoal from the parks, lakes, and streams. And she found that in many Western forests wildfires have long played a key ecological role, but today with a smaller window between fires, the concern is Speaker 4: 04:18 They won't be enough time for trees to establish for seeds to disperse. Speaker 2: 04:23 Turn forests could transform into grasslands. This all dials back to water in 1988, Yellowstone saw a profoundly dry summer priming it for mega fires. It was the kind of hot dry summer that will likely become more frequent in the years ahead, putting Yellowstone's wildfire resilience to the test. I'm Robin Vincent in Jackson, Wyoming Speaker 5: 04:55 [inaudible].