The Forest That Fire Unlocked

After the Yellowstone fires of 1988, news cameras captured nothing but ash and standing deadwood stretching for miles in every direction. What had taken centuries to grow was gone in weeks. Ecologists grieved. Tourists stayed home. The landscape looked like the end of something irreplaceable. But scientists knew something the cameras couldn't show. Lodgepole pines — the dominant tree of the Yellowstone plateau — seal their cones with a resin that only melts under extreme heat.…