When a terror-stricken Rocky Barker dashed for his life from a firestorm at Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park in September 1988, he never imagined the experience would eventually coalesce into a 277-page book on how the famous 1988 Yellowstone fires were critical to the history of conservation.
His book, "Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America," was released by Island Press this fall. It chronicles Yellowstone and conservation from the West's earliest exploration and exploitation. It weighs the philosophies of some of the West's most influential public land and conservation figures. It tells the evolving tale of how the federal government has struggled to come to grips with one of the West's most integral phenomena: fire.
"If you'd have told me I was going to write a book about how the Yellowstone fires were critical to the history of conservation, I wouldn't have believed it until 2003," Barker said in an interview. "For me, I was a daily reporter thinking about the next day's story. It wasn't until later that I thought, 'Gee. This is something I might want to write about."
Barker is the environment reporter for The Idaho Statesman in Boise, but he covered the Yellowstone fires as a reporter for the Idaho Falls-based Post Register. To the chagrin of his editors at the time, he rarely left the park during the fires, living out of his car and returning to Idaho Falls on Sundays to submit photographs and do his laundry.
The book was made possible, he said, through a 2002 fellowship with the Boise-based Andrus Center for Public Policy.
Though much of the book is devoted to the history of Yellowstone and the budding conservation movement in the context of wildfire, the Sept. 7, 1988, firestorm at Old Faithful is a powerful portrait of the events that later shaped Barker's finished work.
Barker and Denver Post Reporter Jim Carrier worked away from an envoy of national reporters and stood on a road west of Old Faithful to watch as firefighters dug a line in the face of a wall of 200-foot flames. That's when the wind shifted.
"We ran toward the huge parking lot 150 yards away. Coals were pelting his (Carrier's) back and I could see fist-sized firebrands by my head. We jumped a small stream and stumbled through the forest toward safety. The entire area turned black as night and the howling wind sounded like a jet engine as Carrier and I reached the road into the parking lot.
"With the wind blowing at eighty miles per hour, the parking lot hardly seemed safe. The oxygen returned to the forest we had just left and it ignited as if someone had lit a match to gasoline. The forest was engulfed in a wall of flame that tossed embers in our direction, swirling through the choking smoke like wind devils."
In the interview, Barker described it as "the moment of truth."
"It was scary as hell. I'm still scared of fire. You won't see me volunteering to go work on fires like I did then," he said. "I leave that to the younger reporters."
But don't mistake the drama of the fire for the overall theme of Barker's work. It is a well-informed history, academic in nature.
The very foundation of the book is laid on the concept that Civil War General Philip Sheridan, one of Yellowstone's earliest protectors, had common philosophical ground with original U.S. Forest Service Chief Gifford Pinchot and Sierra Club founder John Muir.
"If there's anything that's new that I'm doing, it's taking the Sheridan story and inserting it into the larger environmental history," Barker said. "I think particularly Sheridan's view of the strong, centralized federal government—that's what Pinchot and Muir shared. I contend that their consensus on strong role for the federal government and fire suppression became the foundation on which conservation was built and carried out for the next 100 years."
Barker relies on the work of prominent names in conservation philosophy and public land management, names like Gifford Pinchot, conservation philosophers George Perkins Marsh, Muir, Aldo Leopold, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau; renowned western explorer John Wesley Powell; and many others.
"The fires of 1988 tested America's ideas about wilderness, about fire, and about our relationship to nature," Barker wrote. "The sweep of environmental history had returned to the place where federal land preservation was born out of fire. Now, with millions of Americans watching live as Old Faithful burned, the fate of a century of nature protection dating back to the days of Phil Sheridan was on the line...Conservation's series of events, achievements, and grassroots movements would lead in and out of Yellowstone for more than one hundred years, tempered by fires and shaped by the conflicts of both friends and foes."
Meet the author
The Environmental Research Center's Armchair Adventures Series Tuesday, Nov. 29, will feature Boise author and environmental reporter Rocky Barker, who will give a talk on his latest book, "Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America." Barker's talk begins at 6 p.m. at the Community Library in Ketchum
Iconoclast Books will provide copies of the book for sale during a book signing immediately following the free presentation.
"Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America"; Island Press, 277 pages.
