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Counterintuitively the knee- and waste-high flames crept through matted and cured grasses straight into the wind coming out of the southwest.
This is what firefighters refer to as “backing.” On Thursday, in a grassy flat just outside the cottonwoods south of the Gros Ventre River floodplain, “backing” was just what Teton Interagency Fire assistant fire management officer Bill Mayer wanted to see.
“If you’ve got a good, continuous fuel bed, it’ll do that,” Mayer said. “For the most part, it’s just backing on its own.”
Firefighters corralling predictably moving flames set the scene for the National Elk Refuge’s first prescribed burn since early in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. The two-decade-long absence of flames from the landscape — best known as a wintering ground for thousands of elk and hundreds of bison — resulted from a lack of funds and resources. But ahead of this spring ....

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