Tonight, This Is All That's Left

Tonight, this is all that's left of Yellowstone. The park says a news anchor said that on this stretch, and you're about to see how the line held up. Two things happened here. In nineteen eighty-four, wind shear blew down a twenty-two mile swath of lodgepole pine. In nineteen eighty-eight the North Fork fire burned through it. That June, eighteen lightning fires were allowed to burn after evaluation, and eleven went out on their own. After July fifteenth no new natural fires were allowed, and after July twenty-first every fire was fought as staffing allowed. It didn't matter. On August twentieth, Black Saturday, the burned area doubled to more than four hundred eighty thousand acres. By the end the fires had affected about eight hundred thousand acres, thirty-six percent of the park, and more than a hundred twenty million dollars had gone into fighting them. What stopped them was a quarter inch of snow on September eleventh. And what was left? Nearly all of it, underground. Heat high enough to kill deep roots reached less than one-tenth of one percent of the park. Most plants lost only their tops, and where there was water, new growth began within days. Relatively few animals died as a direct result, and the fires had no discernible effect on grizzly numbers. Then there's that tree I promised you. Lodgepole carries cones sealed with resin that won't release the seed until it melts at a hundred thirteen degrees or more. This forest keeps a share of next century's trees locked up, waiting for a fire. Up ahead, Virginia Cascade Drive is one-way against us. You'd pass its exit first and its entrance about two miles later, and driving it means doubling back, roughly four extra miles, to see a sixty-foot cascade. In nineteen oh five Chittenden still called Norris to Canyon the least satisfactory road in the park. Then, when cars were approved for August of nineteen fifteen, planners dropped a better route on a forecast that within five years this road would carry only freight and the odd driver wanting a short cut. Today this road is your short cut. That odd driver is you.