This year, the Trump administration gave federal firefighters a mandate: no more letting fires burn. Conventional wisdom among firefighters and public-land managers has held that allowing fires in remote areas to run their course can be beneficial. But now the administration’s new U.S. Wildland Fire Service was to pursue a policy of “full suppression” on every wildfire, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum instructed his workforce, to avoid the possibility of dangerous spread. “Accelerate initial attack,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put it in her own directive to the Forest Service. “Suppress fires early and limit growth.” And when Yosemite National Park caught on fire last month, that is what firefighters did.

The hazy skies above the park filled with aircraft—planes dropping fire retardant on forested slopes; helicopters ferrying hotshot crews to the blaze. At one point, at least 17 helicopters were in rotation, along with more than 1,000 firefighters. “I’ve worked in Yosemite and with Yosemite for almost 40 years,” Tom Nichols, a former head of fire and aviation for the National Park Service (and no relation to the Atlantic writer Tom Nichols), told me. “I’ve never seen that kind of response.”

At the start, attacking the fire aggressively made sense: It had started near a popular hiking trail and was burning on a slope above Wawona, a small community in the park. It looked to be human caused. In such situations, federal policy, even before this year, called for firefighters to use “full suppression” to try to put it out as quickly as possible, former Yosemite fire officials told me.

But as it developed, the Dome Fire spread to the north and east, farther up the mountains, away from any homes or communities. The resources being poured into fighting it began to baffle some fire veterans. As a former Yosemite official put it to me, “There’s really no reason to be attacking a fire like that.” (I spoke with several sources for this story who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and hoped to avoid professional repercussions.) Such an aggressive approach can be dangerous. Five days into the effort to put it out, one of the helicopters was doing water-bucket drops from a nearby lake when it crashed. Both pilots died.

“For what?” one federal fire official told me. “There’s nothing out there. Just let nature do its thing.” Another official had to ask: “Did they die in vain?”

Under the Trump administration’s policy of full fire suppression, so far this year entrapments—when firefighters’ positions are surrounded by flames—are above the average for the previous two decades. At least 17 wildland firefighters, pilots, and contractors have been killed, surpassing the full-year average over the past decade, according to the Wildland Firefighter Foundation. That number includes four firefighters in Colorado who died this summer responding to the Knowles and Gore fires as flames spread amid high winds and low visibility. After that incident, several Democratic senators called on the Interior Department to investigate whether the full-suppression policy put firefighters at undue risk.

Brian Fennessy, the Wildland Fire Service chief, doesn’t think that the new policy is putting firefighters in more danger, he told me. The two pilots’ deaths in the Dome Fire were a tragedy—one he hopes his agency can learn from—but “this was not the year to allow managed fire on the landscape,” he said. The winter was historically warm, and snowpacks were at record lows across much of the western United States. Federal authorities were not about to let fires burn unattended, even in the wild. And the administration’s policy of suppression does mean increasing the number of people and helicopters fighting a given fire, he said: “Instead of two engines and a helicopter, maybe you’ve got four engines, two helicopters, maybe an air tanker.” Given how hot and dry it’s been, had firefighters not focused on putting out fires, in Yosemite and elsewhere, many could have been worse, he said.

The question of whether to harness or extinguish fire is particularly relevant in Yosemite. This is where America’s formal debate over that policy began, after Abraham Lincoln signed a bill in 1864 to grant the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to California as a public trust. The commission to oversee the area disagreed about the question of annual burning by Native Americans, Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, told me. Fires set by the Ahwahneechees were “deliberate and purposeful, even artful,” Pyne writes in his book about Yosemite’s fire history, Pyrocene Park: “They burned to keep grasslands open and attract game animals like deer to fresh forage; to keep trees from crowding out annual-grass prairies; to help harvest acorns; to stimulate willows useful for basketry; to promote berries.” Some of the Yosemite’s first commissioners saw the value in that. Others, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, considered such fires vandalism that undermined, as he put it, “the duty of preservation.”

For more than a century afterwards, the suppressionists prevailed until, in 1974, Yosemite leaders allowed a major lightning-caused fire to burn in the Illilouette Creek basin, whose creek runs behind Half Dome, the park’s famous bald mountain. This was the first big test of its new policy to manage certain fires for ecological benefit. Since then, more than 100 fires have come through that basin, and scientists have documented its renaissance. The proportion of the basin covered by dense conifer forest fell by 20 percent, and a mosaic of meadows and grasslands emerged. Biodiversity bloomed, as bees and bats and understory plants thrived. Even streams flowed a bit more abundantly, as fewer trees competed for water and snow had more open space to accumulate, Scott Stephens, a professor of wildfire science at UC Berkeley, told me. The regular burning also makes the basin more capable of handling future fire, he said, by minimizing how much of it burns at a destructive intensity. It’s now “one of the most resilient, functioning forests in all of California.”

Set under the right conditions, prescribed fires, too, can help prevent hotter-burning conflagrations. The evidence was plain just four years ago in Yosemite, when the Washburn Fire bore down on the Mariposa Grove and its revered giant sequoias. The park had conducted more than 20 prescribed fires in that area since the 1970s. And when the Washburn Fire approached the grove, the flames moved around the treated areas as if they were boulders in a stream, sparing the sequoias that have been burning up in great numbers elsewhere in California.

But this year, at least, under the Trump administration’s leadership, the park seems to have stepped back from prescribed burns as well. Although in many recent years Yosemite has done several prescribed fires, this year the park has done none and even canceled a long-planned prescribed fire near the Mariposa Grove scheduled for May, around Memorial Day, according to two people familiar with the decision. They added that Ray McPadden, the superintendent of the park, was concerned it would affect park visitation because it required closing parts of the grove temporarily. (McPadden did not respond to a request for comment; the Wildland Fire Service said Yosemite was looking for an opportunity to complete the burn this fall.)

Over the long term, avoiding fire puts the sequoias at risk, Cicely Muldoon, who retired as Yosemite’s superintendent last year, told me. And on top of that, jettisoning controlled burns, which ultimately keep fires modest, also means that “you’re really putting people in harm’s way.” A little fire—however it starts—can help prevent future huge fires.

Under the Trump administration’s reorganization of federal firefighting resources, superintendents of national parks no longer decide how to manage fires that start within their borders. That authority now lies with the Wildland Fire Service, which is housed within the Department of the Interior. After last summer’s Dragon Bravo fire at the Grand Canyon, a lightning-caused fire that destroyed more than 100 buildings, Trump-administration officials have shunned the notion of letting fires burn for the health of the landscape.

From the beginning, people fighting the Dome Fire—including those from the National Park Service and two different California interagency incident-management teams—did all that they could to put the fire out, for weeks. Because it was burning on remote slopes, these firefighters relied heavily on helicopters to reach the flames, haul in supplies, and drop water. (The teams also sent in mule trains and firefighters hiking on foot.) Crews camped in the woods as they cut fire lines by hand. Such a response is expensive too. Fighting a 6,700-acre fire that has burned no buildings has cost at least $55 million so far, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Wildland Fire Service said in a statement that fire managers were concerned about different assets as the fire progressed, including Yosemite West—another nearby community—and the Badger Pass ski area.  

In the field, the work was logistically complex, and its tempo was high. Six firefighters got injured or became ill, according to the Wildland Fire Service. People were reporting falls, bee stings, smoke inhalalation, one firefighter told me, and the frequency of incidents was “more than you’d expect” for what they were gaining from keeping the fire at bay, the firefighter said. “People were like, What are we doing? There’s nothing out here. We’re slamming this fire shut,” this person added. “People were questioning that.”

Congestion from so many helicopters caused safety concerns, too, including a close call on September 19 between a firefighting helicopter and skydivers near the Mariposa-Yosemite Airport, a small airfield outside the park. Although an employee from Skydive Yosemite had alerted firefighters about their plans in a morning briefing, when five people jumped from 14,000 feet later that day, they floated down as a helicopter carrying cargo hovered in the vicinity of their landing zone, Paul Wignall, the company’s owner, told me. The helicopter pilot did not appear to be monitoring radio messages from the skydiving plane, Wignall said, and one of the divers drifted close enough to make eye contact with the helicopter pilot. By the time others in the group came down, the helicopter had flown off. Wignall was particularly concerned about the powerful rush of air from the helicopter’s blade. “If he can see a parachute coming, he should get the hell out of there,” Wignall said.

During the incident, the helicopter pilot “took action in response” to the skydivers, the Wildland Fire Service said in a statement, and firefighters later met with the skydiving operator to discuss the incident. The FAA brought in a temporary control tower, and firefighters moved equipment to avoid potential problems, Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson on one of the interagency incident-management teams for the Dome Fire, told me. Authorities would later close the airport for a week. The day after the skydiving incident, another helicopter went down fighting the fire.

The circumstances of the deadly crash on September 20 remain under investigation. The firefighting community has rallied support for the families of the two pilots who died—Greg King and Ryan Cutter—and held ceremonies to honor their service. The pilots worked for Precision, a Forest Service contractor based in Oregon. After the crash, the use of aircraft on the fire paused as Fire Service managers assessed the safety risk. The losses cast a shadow over the whole enterprise.

The danger of letting a fire burn might very well have been higher than normal because of the hot, dry conditions this year, as Brian Fennessy, the federal fire chief, said. But these types of years are more common now. The next one could be hot and dry too. In Yosemite, and across America, the choice to always put the fires out carries its own risks. The kindling keeps piling up, increasing the chance that the next one will be so big that no one can control it.

Updated at 1:36 p.m. on October 10, 2026

For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 2 fastball that slammed into the Gulf Coast last night along the Florida panhandle. “I think we knew at some point we would likely have a hurricane,” Daniel Brown, the operations-division chief at the National Hurricane Center, told me.

Not to be outdone, the Pacific Ocean has two major storms brewing, including Hurricane Simon, a dangerous Category 4 storm off the coast of southwestern Mexico. A smaller one, Tropical Storm Rachel, is forecast to bring potentially more storm surge and flooding as far north as Southern California. “It’s a busy day here,” Brown said on Friday.

This season’s dynamic—an unruffled Atlantic and a frothing Pacific—has been right out of the El Niño playbook and was predicted months ago. El Niños tend to generate opposing winds—low-altitude trade winds out of the east and higher-up westerlies—that tear apart Atlantic storms as they try to form and also keep them from gaining strength. This type of wind shear is affecting Hurricane Isaias now, Brown said, and weakened the storm a little before it made landfall.

Isaias landed along the Gulf Coast with sustained winds of more than 100 mph; in places, it dropped more than a dozen inches of rain. Coastal counties had ordered evacuations; the governors of Alabama and Florida had declared emergencies; residents had scrambled through hurricane prep. During the storm, the wind ripped off roofs and toppled tree. t\Two people, one in Florida and one in Alabama, died after trees fell on their house, authorities said. Nearly 800,000 people were without power across the Southeast as of Saturday morning, according to poweroutage.com.

In the Pacific, by contrast, a Category 4 hurricane is almost par for the course this season. By this time of year, the Pacific has usually generated 13 storms potent enough to warrant their own name, Brown said. This year, we’re on number 19. This onrush of hurricanes has a great deal to do with the buildup of abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific—which, at this point, are in certain areas more than 4 degrees Celsius warmer than usual. This warming gins up storm activity in that ocean; it’s been spinning up hurricanes and hurling them toward Hawaii for months. The storm swells have also eroded Southern California beaches and swamped homes, and they keep coming. On Friday, seawater flooded the streets of Balboa Peninsula, California, inundating cars and homes, well before Tropical Storm Rachel was anywhere close to arriving.

The coast of Mexico is at particular risk from Hurricane Simon, which is forecast to bring potentially dangerous flooding and landslides to coastal states such as Jalisco and Nayarit. Further north, on the Baja California peninsula, communities are still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Polo, which caused widespread flooding last month and displaced hundreds of people.

The storm scorecard in these oceans has only reinforced the notion that the world is in the midst of an unusually powerful El Niño. As I reported in August, key areas of the Pacific Ocean had already gotten hot enough to make this a “Super El Niño”; the experts I spoke with then were anticipating that the event could end up peaking at twice that amount of warming. If those trends hold, this could be the strongest El Niño ever recorded, and right now, “everything seems to be on track with this being a remarkable event,” Nick Novella, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.

This season has set a record already—this is the latest in the year that a hurricane has formed in the Atlantic at any time during the satellite era, since 1966. And it isn’t even close. “This record was broken by nearly a month,” Novella said. Normally, five Atlantic hurricanes form by the end of September. For residents of the Gulf Coast, the beleaguered hours after a storm makes landfall are all too familiar. As they assess the wreckage, hopefully the year’s first Atlantic storm will not have changed too dramatically how we remember this season of relative calm.