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Yvonne Baskin, Yellowstone fires: A decade later: Ecological lessons learned in the wake of the conflagration, BioScience, Volume 49, Issue 2, February 1999, Pages 93–97, https://doi.org/10.2307/1313532
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Atop a ridge in Yellowstone National Park in 1984, a freak summer wind—perhaps a tornado or a downburst from a thunderstorm—leveled an ancient lodge-pole pine forest, piling up a head-high maze of logs. In the notorious summer of 1988, when wildfires burned one-third of the park, a fire front swept across the same ridge, incinerating everything under four inches in diameter and charring the rest. The result was a scene so desolate that a network television crew chose it as the backdrop to declare Yellowstone's “legacy in ashes.”
A few years later, the park service built a wooden boardwalk across the blackened ground at that site atop the Solfatara Plateau above the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. At the end of the walk, an interpretive sign tells of the blowdown and the subsequent wildfires and proclaims: “After two consecutive deforestations, this site can still reseed with grasses and shrubs, but it may remain a meadow for decades.”
