Fires Ignite Dispute : Yellowstone: Natural Lab or Business?

When Jim Christiansen eyes the landscape here, he sees needlessly charred meadows, senselessly scorched and blackened husks of lodgepole pines and--uglier still--all those dollar signs that may not ring up on his hotel’s cash register.

Joe Halladay has another vision, one of an unavoidable, wrenching devastation but also of an awe-inspiring rebirth and renewal that is part of fascinating and ever-changing nature.

“We’ve lost an old friend, but I want to look forward to the new friend coming,” said Halladay, a government naturalist at Yellowstone’s famous Old Faithful geyser complex. “It isn’t the end of the world. The land will regenerate itself, and I’ll enjoy watching it return.”

Fears Tourists Won’t Come

Christiansen, frustrated proprietor of the Madison Hotel in West Yellowstone, Mont., said with a sigh: “I’m not interested in what’s going to happen 20 years down the road, I’m interested in what’s going to happen next year to bring tourists here. People don’t come here to see burned rocks and trees.”

There are two very different views of the monstrous wildfires that have ravaged the pristine glory of Yellowstone, views that have ignited a roaring dispute over federal fire-fighting policy in the country’s oldest and grandest national park.

One, shared by most of Christiansen’s irate friends and neighbors as well as a good number of area politicians and others with clout, sees the fires as a calamity that could have and should have been foreseen and prevented by authorities.

“Yellowstone may have been destroyed by the people who were assigned to protect it,” Sen. Alan K. Simpson, a Wyoming Republican, charged.

Fires Called Nature’s Way

On the other hand, park officials and their defenders in the environmental community say that the weather in this drought year has been so unusually dry and the winds so severe that nothing could have stopped the blazes. Furthermore, they argue, fires are a vital ingredient in the evolution of the landscape, nature’s way of purging the woods of rotting vegetation while punching holes in the forest gloom that inhibits growth of new plant and animal species.

“Fire has a healthy role in the reproduction of the forest,” said Michael Scott, regional director for the Wilderness Society. “ . . . We can watch the park be reborn. We’re all midwives in this.”

The schism underscores a more basic conflict over the demands that Americans have put on the 2.2-million-acre park itself. It is a scenic treasure, filled with magnificent forests, lakes, wildlife and grand vistas, a magnet for more than 2 million tourists a year.

At the same time, Yellowstone has also been set aside by Congress as a vignette of primitive America, a kind of living museum designed to preserve a slice of the American West as it was before the white man came and started building and polluting. And fire--even catastrophic fire--is part of that natural heritage.

Controversy is no stranger to Yellowstone. There has been friction over development, land management, wildlife preservation and the deliberate shooting of species such as grizzly bears and elk to control their population.

Perhaps Greatest Controversy

Nothing, however, has raised the hackles of critics quite like this summer’s fires, which have cut a swath of destruction in and around a park equal in size to the state of Delaware. As massive smoke clouds spread haze across the Midwest, the repercussions have spread even farther, to Washington, where several congressional committees plan investigations of park service conduct and the economic impact of the damage.

But should the focus of those inquiries be over who lost Yellowstone? Or should they center on whether anything has been lost at all?

The uproar already has led the Reagan Administration to back down from a hands-off approach toward park management. Much to the chagrin of environmentalists, Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel has jettisoned the controversial “let-burn” policy that has allowed nature to run its course unless fires were set by man or threaten lives or property.

And Hodel told residents here last week that he might approve programs to reseed trees and other plants as well as provide feed for wildlife whose winter grazing grounds have been damaged. Environmental groups fear that such interventionist measures could disrupt the course of natural recovery and taint the area with exotic weeds and grasses that otherwise would not grow here.

Several Issues Arise

The feuding covers several issues: Have fires been fought prudently or have park officials aggravated the situation by ignoring clear warning signs of serious drought? Have firefighters been handcuffed by inflexible environmental restrictions? And, most vexing of all, why have decades of highly combustible debris from dead trees and plants been allowed to accumulate, posing the same kind of fire hazard in a huge forest that discarded papers and rags might in a basement or garage?

Critics ridicule park bureaucrats for a myopic and impractical dedication to the scientific mission of Yellowstone. “They’re fuzzy-headed,” said Kathy Gosin, a California nurse with a summer home near the park. Lorents Grossfield, a Montana cattle rancher, agreed. “There’s an ivory tower kind of mentality,” he said.

And Ed Francis, a rancher whose 12,000-acre spread borders the park on the north, complained that officials took a laboratory approach to fire management. “This is just an experiment gone awry,” he said. “It’s like the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice.’ ”

But Park Supt. Robert Barbee, although terming extensive fire damage a “catastrophe,” said that park officials had handled the situation responsibly. “We don’t have anything to apologize for,” said Barbee, who came to Yellowstone six years ago after a long career in federal parks in California.

Demands for Mott’s Ouster

Barbee has been a lightning rod for critics, who blame the out-of-control infernos on mismanagement rather than weather, and some have demanded his ouster along with that of his boss, National Park Service Director William Penn Mott Jr.

One local newspaper quoted Barbee over the weekend as complaining about a “lynch mob mentality” and contending that anyone who believes that the summer’s disaster could have been averted has been “chewing lotus seeds.”

This has been the worst season for fires in Yellowstone park’s 116-year history and, experts say, probably the worst in the region since Colonial times. The fires, most of which were touched off by lightning, began in June on drought-ravaged land either in the park itself or nearby.

At first, authorities stuck to the “let-burn” policy. They allowed more aggressive suppression efforts only after mounting complaints from park neighbors as natural fires grew in severity and were joined by the massive man-caused North Fork blaze in late July. By then, though, even park officials acknowledge it may have been too late to limit the damage.

“We’d have had a whole lot of fire no matter what anyone did,” Barbee insisted.

Defends Strategy

In an interview, he defended firefighting strategy in the park, while at the same time stressing that he had little to do with it. Those decisions, he said, were initially made by a committee of scientists, wildlife managers and other experts on the park staff before responsibility was passed on to a federal inter-agency task force based in Boise, Ida., as the situation worsened.

“The assumption is I sit here and pull all kinds of strings and make all the calls,” said Barbee. “. . . It isn’t Bob Barbee making these calls; it’s dozens of people.”

Barbee said that the Yellowstone spring this year had been exceptionally wet, giving officials no reason to suspect at first that the worst drought of the century was about to set in and that extraordinary suppression efforts might be needed.

Residents scoff at that claim. Francis, the rancher, said that park officials should have suspected something unusual when the winter snowpack was “extremely low,” river levels peaked weeks ahead of normal and the fire season began two months early. “Everything was saying ‘drought’ by June,” Francis said.

Audience Snickers

And Francis recalled that the audience at a recent community meeting snickered derisively at Barbee when he expressed surprise over the high winds that have fanned flames. Both residents and weather experts say that August is a gusty month in these parts.

“Wyoming is noted for winds,” Victor Hasfurther, the state climatologist, said. Meteorologist Shawn Rampy of WeatherData Inc., a private weather consultant to The Times, agreed: “While winds were probably at times above average, they certainly weren’t abnormal.”

Critics contend also that some blazes got out of hand because park officials refused initially to relax restrictions on mechanized equipment for fear that it could damage the fragile landscape. Barbee has denied such charges, but there is evidence to support them in at least one critical instance--the monstrous North Fork blaze that threatened the Old Faithful complex last week and has consumed nearly 250,000 acres of timber.

That blaze, touched off by a logging crew, broke out on July 22 in Idaho’s Targhee National Forest, several hundred yards from the Yellowstone border, according to U.S. Forest Service ranger Rodd Richardson. He said that Forest Service fire crews jumped quickly into a “full-suppression” mode, throwing everything they had at the fire, including pumpers and aircraft to spray water and retardant, chain saws to slice down trees and bulldozers to cut firebreaks in the landscape.

Methods Change

As the fire spread, Richardson said, he called his Yellowstone counterpart, Park Service ranger Joe Evans, to get permission to bring his full arsenal of equipment onto park land. Evans gave the go-ahead for everything but bulldozers and motorized vehicles, Richardson said. In a matter of minutes, efforts to fight the same fire on the same terrain went from heavy machinery and tanker trucks to hand crews and portable pumpers.

As intense as the controversy over firefighting tactics has been, a dispute over what precautionary measures park officials could have taken to minimize fire damage has generated equal heat.

Alston Chase, a Montana ecologist who has been a leading critic of park policy, said that a series of small controlled fires, known as “prescribed burns,” should have been lit periodically over the years. Such blazes are standard fire prevention techniques at many federal forests and parks, including Yosemite and Sequoia in California. Not only are they used to reduce the so-called “fuel load” of dead trees and plants that build up, but they create a mosaic of fire breaks that can slow or stop flames should a wildfire break out.

Although park policy allowed for prescribed burns, few were ever set at Yellowstone. “The mistakes were all made prior to this summer,” Chase said. “This summer, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Park Service tried immediately to put them (the fires) out.”

Comparisons Called Unfair

But defenders of the park administration say that comparisons between the policies of Yellowstone and that of parks such as Yosemite are unfair. For example, Scott, the Wilderness Society official, said that the terrain and climate of the two parks are vastly different. At Yellowstone, Scott said, prescribed fires would be hard to set in the spring when it is wet and they would be easy to control. And in the drier summer or fall, when fires are easier to set, they would be much harder to control, he said.

“Who wants to be the person who is accused of starting a 50,000-acre fire?” Scott asked.

Ironically, however, the fuel buildup contributed to fires of a much greater magnitude. Infernos such as this year’s Yellowstone fires are unprecedented in modern times, but conservationists say that they have occurred in the past and are part of the natural cycle of evolution in the forest.

As lodgepole pine forests mature, they develop a thick canopy that crowds out sunlight and tends to choke the growth of flowers, plants and grasses. In turn, that restricts the variety of wildlife because many animals depend on such undergrowth for food.

Ashes from the fire would enrich the soil with nutrients, while increased sunlight would spur the growth of new species of wildflowers, fruit-bearing shrubs, grasses, aspens and other flora, Scott predicted. That, he said, should provide a better food source and more appealing habitat for bear, elk, deer, moose and other wildlife.

More Diverse Habitat

“We’re going to start to see things come back quickly, and we’ll see a more diverse Yellowstone,” Scott said. “ . . . What people aren’t going to see immediately is a mature forest. It will take 20 to 40 years to see that.”

Such a prospect might be exciting to biologists, but it is of little solace to those whose livelihoods depend on Yellowstone.

“There’s an esoteric reason for having the park,” acknowledged Christiansen, the hotel owner. “But the reality is that it’s a tourist attraction for millions of people, and they expect to see trees and lakes and animals, and, if they’re not there, people won’t come. The other reality is that it’s a business.”

Judy Wagner, who owns a summer home in West Yellowstone, said that park policy, while theoretically desirable, is unrealistic. “If you want a natural park, you don’t put roads in,” she said. “To be totally natural, the only way you could see it is on foot. You can’t have a totally simplistic approach to the management of a park.”

Trevor Povah, a local cattle rancher, said: “There’s no way they can ever recoup in my lifetime. The park’s going to be a black forest for 100 years.”

Staff writers Ron Taylor in Los Angeles and Josh Getlin in Washington and researcher Rhonda Bergman in Chicago contributed to this story.