Yellowstone is Burning
Looking back at the Yellowstone Fires of '88
It was an unusually dry summer. The fire evolved forests of northwestern Wyoming were already burning when high winds from persistent weather fronts rapidly pushed the fires to extraordinary proportions. These conditions ultimately caused vast expanses of Yellowstone National Park to burn. When the fire season finally ended in October, the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 would become one of the most dramatic and documented fire seasons in North American history.
The statistics for the 1988 Greater Yellowstone Area Fires still astonish: 25,000 firefighters; 665 miles of hand-cut fireline; 137 miles of bulldozer constructed fireline; 1.2 Million acres burned throughout the greater Yellowstone area with 793,000 acres within Yellowstone Park’s 2.3 million acre boundary.
The Yellowstone fires saw unprecedented national media attention (a claim could easily be made that the Yellowstone fires were the most extensively covered fire event ever), as many feared the nation’s “crown jewel” National Park was being destroyed. Intense scrutiny and debate over America’s national fire management policies ensued, the impacts of which still resonate today.
The following series of interviews will take you into the minds of fire managers, reporters, fire information officers, politicians, and policy makers, where you can glimpse for yourself what it might have been like to have worked in Yellowstone in 1988.
But we are asking you to do more than just watch these podcasts; we are asking you to learn from them.
A critical task of a learning organization is its ability to capture information from the past and to learn from it. This is the basic intent of the following podcasts—to provide a mechanism that might improve the way you do your job. It is our modest hope that they might even become an essential platform for your own self-development as a fire manager.
The Yellowstone is Burning podcast series is divided into three parts: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Your Performance, Communicating the Story and Managing Yourself and the Fires. The series includes 18 individual interviews with people working up and down the fire management chain of command, including a former Secretary of Interior, a Type 1 Incident Commander, numerous information officers, national and local newspaper and television reporters and staff officers working in the Washington Office of the National Park Service. The introduction to each series specifically addresses what is included in the podcasts that follow.
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 Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Your Performance
What do Tiger Woods and Chris Rock have in common?
They both became exceptional through using a process called deliberate practice. In this podcast, you will learn what deliberate practice is and how you can use it to improve your own performance as a fire manager. More…
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 Communicating the Story
(7 Videos)
The media coverage of the Yellowstone Fires was controversial. The fires were large, complex and difficult to report. No one, neither reporters nor fire information officers, had seen or even imagined a fire event on this scale before.
The podcast interviews in this series will help fire managers develop a deeper appreciation for the roles, responsibilities and difficulties FIOs and reporters had in communicating the Yellowstone fire story.Watch Series: 
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 Managing Yourself and the Fires
(7 videos)
It boggles the mind to think about the tens of thousands of decisions, large and small, that were made in managing the fires in Yellowstone Park during the summer of 1988.
The sequence of podcasts that follow is a potpourri of viewpoints and lessons learned from the people who had to make those decisions- had to personally live with the fires and their effects. As you will see in these interviews, not only were the ecosystems of Yellowstone Park profoundly affected, but the firefighters themselves.Watch Series:
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