A photographer who has published a book of photography and writing about Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks says last year's fires at Yellowstone helped the ecosystem.
"The park is coming back beautifully. There's really no problem," said Lorraine Salem Tufts, who is in Salt Lake City for a book signing at Walden Books, Crossroads Mall, on Saturday afternoon. Her book is "Secrets in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.""It's still a great place to go, still a great place to spend your holidays. The fires of 1988 will not impair your holidays and hiking and adventures."
Fire is part of nature's cycle, she said, but the National Park Service "had a lot of problems" with early decisionmaking on how to cope with the burning forests.
"The natural fires should have burned, and the fires that were man-made should have been extinguished as soon as possible, and most were. But the North Fork fire did burn."
This was man-made and it got out of control, heading toward inhabited areas.
The Park Service was lucky that snow began falling in mid-September, "because if it had not, it would have turned into a disaster," she said.
Perhaps because of the fire enriching the soil, "the wildflowers were incredible this year," she said. About 20 percent of the white pines burned, but of the 80 percent that were left, the trees had a tremendous crop of pine nuts.
Grizzly bears feasted on the nuts this fall. "They ate the pine nuts, and they ate and ate and ate."
Many elk and bison starved to death because of the fires, which provided a great deal of meat for the carnivores. It also thinned out the herds of ungulates, "which was good; they really needed to be thinned."
Tufts lives in North Palm Beach, Fla., most of the year, but spends about four months every year in a trailer at Yellowstone - taking photos of wildlife and doing volunteer work for the National Park Service. She has been living at Yellowstone part-time for the past four years and visiting the park for 12 years.
To take her stunning animal photos, she uses 35-millimeter cameras with motor drives and lenses that range from wide-angle to 600 millimeter telephoto. She took about 20 percent of the 101 photographs in the book, while 15 other men and women took the rest.
Tufts also wrote the text, with her niece, Tracy I. Holmes, researching the historical sections.
Asked how she manages to get the pictures of wild animals, Tufts said, "I'll prop myself into the sagebrush, then I'll sit down, I'll have a lot of shrubbery around me."
She might be aware that a bald eagle likes to hunt from a particular tree, for instance. So she will wait for him to show up in that area - maybe for six or seven hours.
"Sometimes I might put some sort of little towel over my head or a dark cloth or something, but most of the time I just wear dark colors."
The cover photograph is by Steven Fuller, a view of two foxes dancing in the snow. She said Fuller is Yellowstone's winter keeper and has been watching these foxes for years, at their den near the horse corral.
Finally, the animals got used to him and "allowed him to get that close to them when they were doing their mating dance." Of the photo, she said, "It's a phenomenal thing because that was taken with only a 180-millimeter lens."