I stand before the mine adit where Pulaski survived the 1910 fire in 2010
The memory of Old Faithful in 1988 stuck I my mind as I crawled into the Nicholsen adit silent, sobered and awestruck.
The date August, 20, 2010, was the 100th anniversary of the day when Forest Ranger Ed Pulaski led 45 terrorized firefighters into the mine tunnel as the firestorm of the Big Blowup of 1910 was within seconds of roasting them.
I had made the pilgrimage to Wallace to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the fire that burned 3 million acres in two days and killed 78 firefighters. It also was the 22nd anniversary of Black Saturday during the 1988 Yellowstone Fires. I was one of the speakers at the celebration in Wallace in part because of my book, Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America.
Pulaski had walked up the narrow valley of Placer Creek to meet the firefighters who had been rounded up in Spokane and Missoula to fight the blazes. They were dazed and scared, Stephen Pyne, the author of the 2001 classic, Year of the Fires, called them a mob.
As my eyes got used to the darkness of that tunnel I could see that it turned to the left. It narrowed past where a barrier is erected to keep people out.
Snails sat attached to the wet rocks and an ouzel flew to the opening from the shallow running waters of Placer Creek at the entrance.
I thought of men strangling each other and crying for their mothers. I knew their fear.
Pulaski was the leader, this mob knew, as he led them ahead of the fire down the canyon. Fire burns slower going down than up, so they were able to keep ahead of it at first. But eventually the day turned to night and the roar that sounded like dozens of locomotives enveloped them from all sides.
They squeezed into the tunnel, some using horse blankets to put out fires on the timbers until their hands were scorched. Several panicked and wanted to leave. Pulaski pulled his gun and made them lie down to get the miniscule oxygen left on the floor.
I hiked the steep two-mile trail just outside of Wallace. It is arguably the best landmark of the 1910 fire than led the U.S. Forest Service to its long policy to try and put out every forest fire..
All of the men in the tunnel had passed out due to smoke inhalation and lack of oxygen. When he woke up, one climbed through the bodies, including Pulaski’s to head down the trail to Wallace.
He reported the incident at 3 a.m. and said he was the only survivor. A relief party was organized and headed up the now burned-out canyon up the trail to the tunnel. In the meantime, some of the other firefighters awoke and crawled out.
One said Pulaski was dead. “Like Hell he is,” the ranger said from his place on the floor of the mine.
The tunnel soon after the 1910 fire
Only six died and the survivors, blind, burned and even their shoes burned off, struggled down the trail hikers now traverse for cardio workouts.
The story wasn’t especially powerful at the time,” Pyne told a gathering at the Elks Club in Wallace at the celebration. It grew as the Forest Service grew around its main conservation mission, firefighting, which was forged out of the wreckage of the 1910 fires.
Pulaski’s story became the creation myth on which the agency built it own story. Firefighters even today use a Pulaski, the combination axe and hoe that the ranger later designed.
It remains, Pyne said, a tangible symbol of the heroic and creative ideal the agency long held of itself and its people.
Ironically Pulaski got short shrift from the agency that turned him into its hero. He got little financial help to pay for his injuries and he died soon after retirement.
What would Pulaski think about today’s fire policies? One of the people at Pyne’s talk asked the historian.
Pulaski was no philosopher, Pyne said. He was a lot like many of the people in the Wallace area still today, he thought with his hands.
The four 1910 fire veterans who headed the Forest Service until 1939 made sure that full suppression was the only acceptable policy of the Forest Service. That slowly changed until the 1970s when the agency began a more nuanced policy that has evolved today toward using fire both to reduce fuels and restore ecological health of the forest.
If someone today like Pulaski was going to try to influence firefighting policy, he probably would be creating a tool, Pyne said.
“Probably like Ed’s it’s going to be a hybrid,” Pyne said.
I chased the fires through Yellowstone 78 years later. For the first time they had growth into a giant conflagration that we now recognize as a megafire.
On August 20 the fires blew up on the anniversary date as Black Saturday. Eighty mph winds breathed new life into nearly every fire. With the humidity explosively low, the North Fork fire steamrolled through the Norris Geyser Basin.
I had gone home for the weekend in 1988 and missed Black Saturday. But I returned on Sunday and saw how much forest had burned on one day. I stayed through September 7 when the fire forced me to run for my life at Old Faithful. That’s where I got an idea what Pulaski’s men experienced. With the roar of the fire and the fear from the speeding flames I wasn't sure I would survive.
Unfortunately, the Yellowstone Fires were the first in the series of megafires that have burned almost annually since 1988 in the West and beyond. They were the signal fires of climate change and the beginning in a new era.
Now entire communities like Paradise, California in 2018 and across Canada in 2023 have burned in uncontrollable megafires. Hundreds of thousands of acres are burning across the West today.
Unlike 1910, no one has an easy answer to controlling these blazes nor the smoke that carries mercury and other deadly pollutants. Only a complete transformation of our economy away from the release of greenhouse gas emissions will reverse global warming and prevent even worse catastrophe.
The Forest Service was wrong after 1910 and the fuels built up in the forests. But climate change has overwhelmed that mistake.
What tool will we create to solve today’s problem?
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