Preparing for Fire Stories

The Tanana Chiefs Conference Fire Crew, which consists mostly of Alaskan Natives tribal members, joined with the NPS Alaska Region Eastern Area Fire Management Program to complete a fuels project in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve during summer 2014 as part of NPS efforts to create fire-adapted human communities.

In 2024, firefighters discovered evidence of a lightning-caused fire at Gulf Islands National Seashore. Dubbed the Pudding Fire, it had been naturally suppressed in an area where extensive mechanical fuel reduction and prescribed fire had taken place.

South Florida Fire and Aviation is building mutually beneficial coalitions with agencies from around the country to help train and utilize required skillsets to meet the fire management workloads. The strategy is to utilize proactive prescribed fire to treat the ecosystem on a landscape level under moderate conditions, while simultaneously training the future generation of wildland firefighters.

In April 2023, NPS Midwest Region staff were joined by fire staff from Alaska to conduct prescribed fires in the Midwest Region. Fire activity and needs vary throughout the country, and it is a common occurrence for resources to be sent to other regions to assist where needed. Fuel reduction projects were completed in multiple Midwest Region parks, totalling nearly 4,900 acres.

In late August 2023, the NPS Alaska Eastern Area Helicopter, with staffing from NPS Eastern Area, NPS Western Area, and BLM Alaska Fire Service, mobilized to the Lower 48 to support wildfires in NPS Pacific West Region. This mobilization was the first time ever the NPS Alaska Region sent an NPS Exclusive Use Fire Helicopter with crew to assist with large fire support in the Lower 48.

In late May/early June 2023, four members of a Western Area Fire Management team in Alaska were joined by three fire staff from Buffalo National River in Arkansas, in NPS’s Midwest Region, and one from Great Smokey National Park in NPS’s Eastern Region, to work on fuels projects at Lake Clark National Park & Preserve.

Park staff initiated a multi-year defensible space project, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to protect human life, modern and historic structures, infrastructure, and natural and cultural resources from the threat of wildfires in and around the Lake Village area of Yellowstone National Park.

In 2021, staff with Katmai and the Alaska regional office developed a mechanical fuels treatment plan around the infrastructure and trails in Brooks Camp. The plan called for thinning and limbing trees and removing downed trees within a 50-foot buffer of the structures and trails/roads. Approximately 65 acres will be treated over five years. This project will help to reduce the fire potential in Brooks Camp.

More than half of NPS structures in Alaska are farther than one mile from a road. But these structures are crucial to those who visit remote parts of the state to recreate, subsistence hunt and fish, and work. Often, they provide the only shelter for miles. Difficulty accessing these structures makes them extra vulnerable in the event of wildfire and makes it important to conduct fuels treatments prior to any threats.

The remote community of McCarthy, Alaska is surrounded by boreal forest within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in south-central Alaska. In 2011, the National Park Service (NPS), in cooperation with the State of Alaska, conducted a 36-acre fuels treatment project that included cutting or trimming trees, creating burn piles, and more, to help protect the surrounding communities from fire. Fire ecologists designed a monitoring study to evaluate the treatment.