. Uhh Carry, I'm from that neck of the woods, I never saw or read reports as you claim. In fact, erosion that first year was far less a problem than first anticipated. Irregardless, those fires were a natural process that burned up hundreds of thousands of acres of DEAD lodgepole pines and opened up the land for vegetation more condusive to the wildlife there.
That was reported directly to me by Ed Tunheim who had gone there and witnessed it. Ed is one of the most respected foresters in California and totally credible. Meyer et al. 1992 reported that the debris was carried over 12km. It was huge and unnecessary.
Irregardless, those fires were a natural process that burned up hundreds of thousands of acres of DEAD lodgepole pines and opened up the land for vegetation more condusive to the wildlife there.
There is no doubt that Yellowstone needed and still needs periodic fires, but there is also no doubt that the way it burned was sub-optimal. The fuel accumulations were wildly in excess of what would have developed without decades of anthropogenic fire-exclusion. I know experts who are dubious about the ash strata studies claiming that fires of similar scope are not that unusual (including Doug Leisz who once headed the USFS). Tom Bonnicksen (probably the best fire archaeologist in the country) believes that pre-Columbian fires in Yellowstone were frequent, with a nearly annual composite frequency and (IIRC) point frequencies of but ten to forty years.
It would have been better if the forests had been thinned (in some spots even clear cut), and then burned in blocks. As it was, a lot of soils were dislodged unnecessarily, streams polluted (with ammonium phosphate), and wildlife died needlessly (at least half of the moose in the park by one report, many of them by starvation after the fire). Sure it's easy to point at the return of wildflowers and fruiting shrubs now, but we could have had the same results with far less destruction.
I've been watching the same destructive "leave it alone" Park Service mentality at work in Yosemite for forty years now. The place is a mess and the fuel accumulations have reached catastrophic proportions as they have in the National Forests. According to the USFS, we now have 190 million acres facing similar risks, although few of them are placing 2,000 year old sequoias on the altar of political correctness as they are in Yosemite.
Having spent 18 years doing habitat restoration on my property, and now possessing the cleanest piece of land (in terms of exotic weed control) anywhere on the Central Coast of California (according to several local botanists, two of whom have been presidents of the California Native Plant Society), I believe I have a minor degree of authority to say that these Park Service spin artists should be taken out and horse whipped for what they've done.