August 8th, a fire was started by a lightning strike about
10 miles west of the campground. We didn't notice it for a few days, since it
was well out in the uninhabited Gneiss Creek area between Norris Geyser Basin
and West Yellowstone. We started seeing smoke from the fire about a week later.
It made for some interesting sunsets.
Another fire started near the northern boarder of
Yellowstone, in the Lamar Valley. We took a drive up to that area on August
16th. By that time, the fire had moved east toward the Slough Creek Campground.
We drove about half way down the dirt road that leads to the campground and
stopped to watch a herd of bison. There was a little bit of scuffling between a
couple of the male bison.
The place we stopped at happened to be a good place to view
the fire as it came up to the crest of the hill, west of Slough Creek
campground.
From Tower Junction the smoke plume was pretty impressive.
The evening of August 22 we drove out towards West
Yellowstone, just to see what the fire nearest our campground looked like. Just
before sunset we parked southwest of the fire and saw the smoke and some
flames.
Just after sunset the fire really became visible.
Coming back from West Yellowstone the next evening there was
a flare up much nearer the road we were on.
August 24th, there was another beautiful sunsets due to the
smoke.
Going out to West Yellowstone again the next day we stopped
at a turnout to take a picture of a boulder in the river. With the water level
much lower now, in late summer, the erosion of the bottom of the boulder is
plainly visible. I'm wondering how many more years it will take for the river
to erode the bottom of it to the point that it tips over.
August 30th we went back out to the Hayden Valley to see if
we could find a herd of bison. We didn't find a single bison. We did find a
bunch of cars parked just north of the Mud Volcano area. We stopped and asked a
ranger at one of the turnouts what everyone was watching, since we couldn't see
much of interest. He told us about a bison calf that was taken down by a pack
of wolves earlier that morning and that there was a grizzly bear feeding on the
carcass at the moment, but it was all taking place below the near side bank of
the river, so we couldn't see it. We did find a bunch of ravens and two bald
eagles waiting their turn to eat. About a half hour after we got there, the
bear drug the kill up on the far bank of the river and we were able to get
pictures of him still feeding on it.
Wednesday, August 31st, we went to Costco and Walmart, in
Bozeman. Smoke from the various fires was very thick in West Yellowstone. The
fire nearest the campground is the largest of the six burning inside the park
at the moment. It has been named the Maple fire and is currently over 37,000
acres. There have been over a dozen lightning caused fires in the park this
year. The National Park Service has
been holding meetings once or twice a week to keep the park employees informed
about the fires. They have also put an evacuation plan in place, but don't
expect to have to use it for at least the next few days, based on their weather
and fire activity predictions. They run a modeling program every day, that
predicts what they think the fire will do over the next four days, using the
data they've collected about the fire, weather, fuels on the ground, etc. So
far, so good. They say they are getting about an 80% correlation between the
model and the fire. I'm not sure that's terribly meaningful since they program
the model to show +/-200% variation from the mean.
No one seems too concerned at the moment, but they are
watching the fire closely and have begun set backfires to try to stop the
spread in a direction where there are structures or people they want to
protect. They have also made water drops on the west side of the fire perimeter
to slow its advance towards West Yellowstone. We have a high ridge between us and the fire and the fire would
have to reach that ridge before they would evacuate us. Last week, they had a
crew in clearing brush away from the structures around the campground and the
ranger housing across the street. They also installed sprinkler systems around
the ranger housing to increase the moisture content near the structures. They
are implementing a complete burn ban in the park tomorrow. Up to today, they
allowed fires in the campground fire rings, but that will stop as of September
1st.
