Wildfire Facts

Forest fires move faster uphill than downhill.

Dolly Parton grew up in Sevier County, Tennessee. In November 2016, wildfires there took 14 lives and destroyed or damaged over 2,400 homes and buildings. Within 48 hours, she launched the My People Fund: $1,000 a month for six months, then $5,000 on the last check. Nearly 900 families were paid, almost $9 million in all. She died on August 25, 2026, at 80. The mountains never forgot who took care of them.

In October 2017 a wildfire forced Guy Fieri and his family out of their Santa Rosa home at 2 a.m. The house survived. By that weekend he and volunteers were feeding more than 5,000 evacuees and fire crews a day, by his own count. He has since cooked for crews at the Camp, Carr, Kincade and Dixie fires. On September 14, 2026 he served dinner to the crews at the Lucas Fire camp.

Smokey Bear was a poster before he was a real bear. In 1950, firefighters in New Mexico found a three-month-old black bear cub clinging to a burned tree, his paws scorched from a wildfire. They nursed him back to health, named him Smokey, and sent him to the National Zoo in Washington DC. He lived there for 26 years. He got so much fan mail he was given his own ZIP code: 20252. He is buried in Capitan, New Mexico.

A firestorm roared into the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone in 1988. Crews climbed onto the roof of the giant log hotel beside the geyser to save it. The fire threw embers the size of fists, and cabins nearby burned. Roof sprinklers added a year earlier kept the shingles wet, and crews beat out the sparks that caught. The Old Faithful Inn they saved still stands.