Fire Night

Over a hundred naturally occurring forest fires a year might burn in Yellowstone; yet rarely does a fire burn more than a fraction of an acre. These lightning-caused fires usually burn only the one tree where the fire started. It takes a combination of low relative humidity and hot, dry wind to carry a fire beyond its origin. This is a night photograph of a small backcountry fire in the Thorofare which burned a few hundred acres during the summer of 2002. During the day there was a bank of smoke in the Yellowstone Valley, but at night individual trees became visible when they exploded briefly and burned brightly and the spots of coals from large fallen trees cast a red glow into the midnight smoke.