As Park Service Regional Director, She Backed ‘Let It Burn’ Decision in Yellowstone : Top Woman Ranger Rode Out Storms--but Feels Heat Over Fire Policy

Whether facing down dynamiters or fighting forest fires, the National Park Service’s highest-ranking woman has spent most of her 30-year career fending off threats to America’s most precious natural resources.

As one of 10 regional directors, Lorraine Mintzmyer oversees 41 parks, including some of the “crown jewels”--Glacier, Mt. Rushmore, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton, Mesa Verde, and the mother of them all, Yellowstone, the world’s first national park.

In the three decades it has taken the 53-year-old civil servant to work her way up from secretary, she has survived many political storms. But the uproar over last summer’s wildfires, which burned 706,278 acres within Yellowstone and cost millions of dollars, was one of the sorest tests in a pioneering career.

Subject of Hearings

“Let it burn” was the name critics gave the park’s natural fire policy, the subject of congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., and around the country.

The Park Service’s wildfire management plan, in effect in Yellowstone since 1972, gave officials discretion in suppressing lightning-caused fires, which usually were allowed to burn unless they threatened life or property.

But last summer’s extraordinary drought, combined with experts’ miscalculations on just how dry Yellowstone really was, forced the Interior Department to declare total fire suppression park-wide on July 21. By then, however, it was too late.

Ultimately, 25,000 firefighters struggled unsuccessfully to contain eight major blazes in and around Yellowstone. Only an early autumn snow brought the conflagration under control in mid-September.

Throughout the crisis, Mintzmyer consulted almost daily with Park Service Director William Penn Mott and then-Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel, along with Yellowstone Supt. Bob Barbee.

Backed Controversial Decision

It was she who backed Barbee’s decision to limit the use of bulldozers to cut fire lines, a decision that angered senators and congressmen from the region as well as hundreds of Monday morning quarterbacks who thought the park service deliberately dragged its feet in firefighting efforts.

She still believes her judgment call was right.

“As responsible managers, we can’t be defensive when our decisions are questioned or our policies are challenged,” she said. “I think, over the long term, there will be a realization that the park and the people who were fighting the fires were doing the best they could under the circumstances.

“It’s one thing to deal with an event like a hurricane or an earthquake because it happens in one day and then it’s done, you clean it up, you live with it. But it’s quite another thing to go through months of it as we did.

“It’s a test the likes of which I’d never had before.”

She praised Barbee, who endured public ridicule and threats. “We know that every time we do something in Yellowstone it takes on proportions which just do not accrue to other areas,” Mintzmyer said.

‘Go at It Again’

“We all get tired, regardless of what profession we’re in. The test is whether you get up the next morning and go at it again.”

Barbee has that kind of stamina, his boss said, but he is not alone.

“I have the energy of two people,” she boasted.

At mid-life she is an avid outdoorswoman and inveterate hiker who tries to sneak in an outing or two in her parks when she visits them on business. Her region covers Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana.

Dressed in her official olive-colored park service uniform, her only flamboyance is fire-engine-red fingernails and the gold ring she had fashioned from her distinguished service pin. The gold embossed circle is one of her most prized possessions.

As only the second woman in park service history to be awarded that honor, Mintzmyer was acutely conscious that she was a trailblazer as she became the first female superintendent of a major park, then the first woman regional director.

“I know that I’ve got to do a good job so that other ladies will have an opportunity. If I were to falter it might be difficult for some of my successors to overcome that,” she said.

Left Banking Career

Always an overachiever, she grew up in a small Iowa town where music dominated her life. She left a banking career and joined the park service in 1959 after a less-qualified man got the job she wanted.

She started out as a clerk-stenographer, became program and budgeting officer, transferred as superintendent of Herbert Hoover National Historic Site in Iowa, and took the helm of Buffalo National River in Harrison, Ark., in 1977, shortly after that park service unit was established.

There, local people were dead set against the park and the government’s assertion of eminent domain to buy up private land.

In a showdown over a stretch of river bank destined to be part of the park but still in private hands, Mintzmyer rammed through a condemnation order as a road contractor prepared to excavate. Then, hastily gathering a force of armed rangers from parks throughout the South, she faced down her adversary on a hill pockmarked with holes filled with dynamite.

“We had this problem of how do you get the darned stuff out of the ground,” Mintzmyer recalled. “We had a 24-hour patrol to make certain nobody got in there while the experts tried to figure it out. I was not very popular.”

Defused Tense Situation

The charges eventually were exploded one at a time “so there wasn’t a chain reaction, just a little ‘poof.’ ”

If she makes mistakes, Mintzmyer says, she hopes she errs on behalf of her parks.

“I have a very rewarding feeling about being a public servant, and I see myself as a leader--when something needs some action I’m not reluctant to get out front and do something about it.”