“The only thing that stopped the Tillamook fire was the Pacific Ocean,” my grandfather said. He wasn’t far off the mark. That 1933 forest fire, one of Oregon’s biggest, was never contained. The firestorm uprooted huge Douglas firs. Cinders rained on ships 500 miles out at sea. The fire scorched 240,000 acres before rain extinguished it. Some 3,000 men fought the blaze. My grandfather was one of them.

I grew up in the forest fire country of southern Oregon. My father and I would drive to the Medford Air Tanker Base
to watch B-17s lumber down the runway loaded with a slurry of fire retardant to smother flames. We’d hear about mechanics picking pinecones out of engine cowlings because the bombers flew so low they’d slice the tops off trees.

This knowledge was useful when photographing a fire in Oregon in 1979 for my first Geographic assignment. When bombers flew overhead, my instinct was to run for cover, until I remembered the knocked-off treetops and headed for a clearing. It was better to be pelted by slurry than crushed by a tree.

In October 1899 this magazine published “The Relation of Forests and Forest Fires,” by Gifford Pinchot, first director
of the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot’s “snuff them” approach to wildfires has since evolved. As photographer Mark Thiessen and writer Neil Shea report, we now know that fire is an ecological necessity. If our understanding has changed, one thing has not: Forest fires still fill us with awe.

Photograph by Mark Theissen, NG Staff Photographer