photo courtesy Jeff Henry, National Park Service
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On June 23, lightning again ignited the forest, Lightning touched down in the Custer National wenty-five years have passed since summer 1988, when wildfire swept through Forest on June 14, just outside the northeast corner this time starting the Shoshone Fire in the southern 36 percent of Yellowstone National of Yellowstone. That strike sparked one of the first portion of the park. Shoshone was joined a week Park’s 2.2 million acres, and Missoula wildfires of the summer, the Storm Creek Fire. Low later by the Red Fire, and a week after that by the local Mike Bader still dreams of fighting snowpack and poor rains in May had left the forest Mist Fire just inside Yellowstone’s eastern border. the blaze. The visions come to him less often now, but they’re always the same: an open field, a crew of firefighters and a towering curtain of flame. The tempo of his voice speeds up in the telling, and his face—once bearded, now covered in graying stubble—wrinkles into an excited smile. It’s as if he’d love nothing more than to be there again, to revisit a time when he was part of a 25,000-person effort to contain the biggest fire season in the Northern Rockies since the Great Burn of 1910. “I was real lucky, I felt, to be there, to be a witness,” Bader says, flipping through one of the many firefighting journals he’s held onto for all these years. “It was like seeing a tornado, or any of nature’s great acts.” Bader was working his fifth summer in Yellowstone as a ranger with the National Park Service, colphoto courtesy Jim Peaco, NPS laborating with grizzly research biologists and managing various resources in the Norris area. He Military fire crews walk to buses near Yellowstone’s northeast entrance on Sept. 4, 1988. knew the district intimately, from the direction of the winds to the concentration and condition of the fuels carpeting the forest floor. He felt a loyalty to Norris the equivalent of a tinder box. Storm Creek sent Forecasts held no hope of rain. On July 11, lighting and a pride in its beauty that kept his enthusiasm billows of smoke into the air, but few hailed it as a started two more fires, one to the east and one just outside the park’s southern border. harbinger of worse things to come. high as the usual host of tourists rolled in.
[14] Missoula Independent • August 22–August 29, 2013
Then, on July 14, three park employees were caught in a firestorm as a 300-acre blaze called the Clover Fire made a surprise 4,000-acre run in just a few hours. The trio deployed two emergency fire shelters, narrowly escaping danger. Park officials issued their first fire maps the following day, marking a transition from letting the fires burn in the backcountry to actively suppressing them. The 1988 firefighting season in Yellowstone had begun. As strong winds fanned the flames of eight established fires, Bader found himself pulled from his district. He spent weeks bouncing from one assignment to the next, working as a radio dispatcher at Mammoth, conducting aerial recon of the Continental Fire, defending the historic Trail Creek Cabin as a crew boss on the Mink Creek Fire. His experience with wildfires in northern California the previous summer—when he and roughly 105 other Yellowstone employees were temporarily loaned out—made him a valued asset in coordinating with overhead crews. But his desire to return to Norris never waned. Between lengthy days of firefighting, he filled his free time monitoring grizzly populations and continuing other projects on behalf of his home district. Bader’s first sense of how big the fires would get came when he was attached to an engine crew defending Grant Village, a development constructed on the western shore of Yellowstone Lake in the 1970s. When Bader arrived on July 23, there were nearly 100 fire engines stacked up along the