Yellowstone Crews Win First Battle : Helped by Snow, Cold; Inferno Still a ‘Sleeping Giant’

Snow showers, plunging temperatures and dying winds Sunday handed exhausted firefighters their first victory in the two-month battle to save Yellowstone National Park. But worried officials warned that the inferno is still “a sleeping giant.”

The break in weather gave crews their first chance all summer to launch a direct frontal attack on the blazes that have stormed across more than 1.2 million acres in and around the nation’s oldest and most popular park.

Helicopters and planes that had been grounded by smoke and wind gusts of up to 60 m.p.h. renewed their aerial assault, dumping water and retardant on flames that at times have shot 300 feet into the smoky sky.

First Containment

Officials also were declaring their first containment in the chain of fires that basically have merged in a horseshoe pattern across the park’s northern half. Containment of the 62,340-acre Hellroaring fire promised to free crews and equipment for parts of Yellowstone still burning wildly out of control.

“We’ve got a chance to get a handle on it,” said Tom Jones, fire behavior analyst on the Hellroaring blaze, which has burned mostly in southern Montana. Only 9,500 acres of Yellowstone’s 2.2 million acres were involved in that blaze.

Meanwhile, about 700 evacuated employees and their families were allowed to return home after flames closed in on three sides of park headquarters in Mammoth and raced to within half a mile of the historic complex. Evacuated residents of Cooke City and Silver Gate, Mont., near the northeast gate to Yellowstone, also returned home Sunday.

Belongings Packed

In Mammoth, Virginia Timms and her family came home but kept their belongings packed in their car in case they must flee again. “I think it’s sad,” Timms said, looking at photographs of Yellowstone in the grandeur that she had come to know and love since her family moved here last November. “It’s like a death in the family.”

Timms, whose husband is a telecommunications technician for the park, said that she believes policies such as the park service’s “let-burn” policy “are made to be broken.”

Across the street, another Mammoth resident was baking cupcakes for her children. Crews behind the village, where park employees and their families live, cleared dead sage to reduce the danger from flaming embers.

“When that fire topped that hill over there I said, ‘I’m packing!’ ” declared the woman, who asked that she not be identified because her husband works for the park. “I took all my kids’ baby pictures.” But the woman said that she bears no hard feelings against officials because of the fires: “I know they’re doing what they can.”

Neighboring communities outside Yellowstone’s northern gate remained on alert, with cars packed and ready to leave should sirens signal that an evacuation is necessary.

After watching the wind-swept fire dance over a ridge above town Saturday night, the 800 residents of Gardiner, Mont., waited for a second anxious day for orders to flee if flames from Yellowstone’s worst fire--the North Fork blaze--advance toward them.

A sign outside Gardiner’s Blue Haven Motel read: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” At the town’s tiny movie house, the marquee billed a comedy: “The Great Outdoors.”

About 50 concerned residents turned out Sunday morning for a briefing by fire officials who cautioned against premature optimism.

‘Sleeping Giant’

“Remember folks, it’s a sleeping giant out there that could get up and move whenever the weather conditions change, so please don’t become complacent,” urged area fire manager Dick Rath.

But the dusting of snow, scattered rain and lighter winds had park employees and firefighters “heaving a collective sigh of relief,” Yellowstone spokesman Joan Anzelmo said.

“If this weather continues for the next two or three days, we may be able to say it’s the turning point,” she said.

Fire officials emphasized that the welcome precipitation can only buy time--not douse the fires, which have been burning since June in the drought-ravaged park.

“The weather is giving us a chance to catch our breath,” said Brian Avery, a fire coordinator. “It’s a lull in the activity but it will probably pick up again in two or three days.” Although a relief, the cold and snow created one problem: some firefighters from Southern California had insufficient warm clothes, and residents in the Cody, Wyo., area were asked to donate some of theirs.

The long-range forecast calls for winds switching from west to east and for temperatures gradually warming from Sunday’s 20s and 30s to the mid-70s by Wednesday--a bad omen for firefighters who have been thwarted from the start by hot, dry, windy weather.

The improved weather Sunday allowed park officials to reopen Yellowstone’s west entrance and the road from there to Madison Junction and Old Faithful. The rest of the park remained closed to visitors.

But Sunday’s break for the weary firefighters did little to dampen the anger that has smoldered during this unprecedented fire season in the gateway hamlets dependent on Yellowstone tourism.

And promises by a Reagan Administration team of Cabinet-level officials who toured the devastation over the weekend apparently have failed to quell accusations that the government mismanaged the fires by waiting too long to fight them.

The Billings, Mont., Sunday Gazette demanded the resignations of Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, National Park Service Director William Penn Mott and Yellowstone Supt. Robert Barbee.

“We have been weaned on the apparent attitude of out-of-staters that Montana is a take-and-run state, that they are the ‘doers’ and we are the ‘doees,’ ” the editorial said.

‘Gambled and Lost’

“Intellectually, of course, we know that Yellowstone is a national park. But deeper, we believe it is ours, these outsider experts have gambled with our treasure--and lost.”

Barbee complained to reporters Saturday that he is the victim of a “lynch-mob mentality.”

Barbee accompanied Hodel, Agriculture Secretary Richard E. Lyng and Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV on their visit Saturday to the fire-ravaged park.

Hodel, who toured the firefighting headquarters in Boise, Ida., Sunday, said that the disastrous 1988 fire season--with more than 3 million acres up in smoke--probably has persuaded federal officials to bury the controversial “let-burn” wildfires policy.

Speaking before flying back to Washington to brief President Reagan on the fire situation in the West, Hodel said that he had “almost no doubt that the let-burn policy will change.”

“I don’t know anyone today who is suggesting the old policy that we began with this year has worked,” Hodel said. “If anyone could have foreseen what has happened this year, that policy would have been abandoned much earlier.

“I suspect that’s going to be corrected rapidly and we’ll see a new policy in place before the beginning of the next fire year,” Hodel said.

Battling the fires has cost an estimated $89 million so far, the Boise center reported.

The Reagan Administration officials have pledged to send more military troops and equipment to help combat the fires.

The half-dozen Yellowstone fires were among more than 30 that remained active on 1.75 million acres in the West.

Meanwhile, light snow or rain and low temperatures Sunday helped firefighters in Idaho and Colorado. Fires also burned in Washington and Northern California.

An inch of rain fell on a 16,600-acre wildfire in northeastern Utah that threatened the tiny town of Whiterocks, about 110 miles east of Salt Lake City. And in Glacier National Park in northern Montana, two firefighters were injured Sunday when a burning tree snag fell and struck the back of a transport vehicle carrying crews to fight a 29,800-acre fire.

Thin smoke from the fires has drifted as far east as Pennsylvania and New York at an altitude of 15,000 to 20,000 feet, the National Weather Service said Sunday.