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The Yellowstone fires of 1988 together formed the largest wildfire in the recorded history of Yellowstone National Park. Starting as many smaller individual fires, the flames spread quickly out of control with increasing winds and drought and combined into one large conflagration, which burned for several months. It was finally extinguished by moist weather in the late fall. A total of 793,880 acres (3,213 km²), or roughly 36 percent of the park was affected by the wildfires. Before the late 1960s, fires were generally believed to be detrimental for parks and forests, and management policies were aimed at suppressing fires as quickly as possible. The beneficial ecological role of fire became better understood in the decades before 1988, and a policy of allowing natural fires to burn under controlled conditions had been highly successful in reducing the area lost annually to wildfires. However, by 1988, Yellowstone was overdue for a large fire, and, in the exceptionally dry summer, the many smaller "controlled" fires combined. The fires burned in a mosaic pattern, leaping from one area to another, while some areas were completely untouched. Large firestorms swept through some regions, burning everything in their paths. Tens of millions of trees and countless plants were killed by the wildfires, and some regions were left looking blackened and dead. However, more than half of the affected areas were burned by ground fires, which did less damage to hardier tree species. (more...)

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