This year has been a wet Spring at Yellowstone National Park, with the most snow in a dozen years hitting the ground. The conditions are pretty similar to how it was at the park 20 years ago, just before the biggest fires in its history.

That's not to suggest we're due for a repeat of the fires of 1988, but it does show just how fast we can go from wet to tinder dry.

"The pattern of wetting and drying is what drives fires" explains ASU Fire Researcher Steve Payne. "So we go through an annual cycle inv the West, then we have droughts on top of that."

The year 1988 brought drought as it was the driest year in the park's history. But early on, there was no hint of trouble and 11 of the 20 early season fires went out by themselves.

As late as July 15, 1988, only 8,500 acres had burned in the Greater Yellowstone area, but just two weeks later, fires had increased more than ten times to 99,000 acres.

The worst day was August 20, 1988, Black Saturday, when fire storms consumed 165,000 acres. Then, on September 7, 1988 the raging fires swept down on the most famous landmark in the world's oldest national park.

Author and journalist Rocky Barker was at Old Faithful Lodge when it happened, on a hillside near where Snow Lodge now stands."

"And suddenly it starts getting a lot of wind. Right up to gale force wind and its turning dark as night, and the sound, rising up to a covey of jets flying over, but staying there and at that moment, now I'm...I don't know what to do" says Barker.

Standing at the edge of the forest, he was less than 100 yards from a frightening wall of flame."

"I'm actually kind of in panic and Jim says, 'let's run', and we turn and we run through about a 100 yards maybe 150 yards of forest..."I get to the parking lot and it's now. We've got fire brands as big as our fist going past our heads. And I'm scared to death, and I turn around and I look at that forest that I had just left and it was like somebody took a match to gas and just whoosh and I just totally lost it, I mean I was just I...and that was only seconds after we had made it to the parking lot...and it was just incredible."

"By this time its blowing and going. It's out of anybody's control there's nothing you're going to do adds Payne. "The backfires, the attempted backfires, are doing more damage than the fires. The whole story is just a shambles."

In the end, nature, with the onset of winter, and not man put out the fires. But more than trees burned as the reputation of forest

Managers, and a new let it burn policy, was scorched. But the public did learn a lesson.

"I think they were very successful at the end in communicating the sense, what they saw as the core message that fire belonged and it was okay" says Payne.

Barker says that  firefighters learned too, "but now that they've had fire after fire and experience after experience, they totally recognize the need to put fire back on the land."

But some knew that all along, including Don Despain, the forest manager in Yellowstone National Park in 1988. He says even in the darkest, the flame lit, hours of 1988, he never once worried that a national treasure was being lost.

"There was a lot of talk about so much is burning it'll take 100 or 200 years for seeds to come back into these destroyed areas... I knew they weren't destroyed. The seeds were there."

Those seeds did sprout and can been seen in the 20 year old reminders of those dark days in 1988, and a promise for tomorrow.

- John Sherer reporting from Z7 in Bozeman