Something quite ironic just happened to me. First a little background... This summer, in an effort to re-establish natural conditions, Grand Teton National Park removed a bunch of wood and barb wire fence. This fence stretched for miles along a park road that accessed the town of Kelly (population ~60) where I lived. It bisected a major migration route used by elk and other wildlife, and many agree that Park was good to remove the fence.

After having disassembled the fence, the Park left the hundreds of wood fence posts and top beams along the edge of the road. In nearby Kelly, nearly every house has a wood burning stove, and to many (including us) the stove is the primary house heater. Naturally, the wood on the side of the road was an excellent prize. It only needed to be bucked up with a chainsaw. The vertical posts had been treated to prevent rotting underground when the fence was initially constructed decades ago, thus they would be toxic to burn; but the horizontal beams were untreated. It was November, and from the perspective of a Kelly resident watching winter roll into Northern Wyoming, the beams were several cords of well-aged lodgepole pine, ready to heat the house.

So, I called up Grand Teton National Park, and talked to a few rangers and biologists about taking the wood. I eventually talked with a park biologist overseeing the fence removal project, and asked him if we may take the lodge pole beams lying along the side of the road. This man told me that, by asking for the wood, I had created a bit of a "beaurocratic conundrum". See, the wood is considered federal property. And, since I asked for it, that must mean I want it, and that it must have some sort of value. According to National Park rules, if it has value, it has to be sold. We both laughed. After all, he admitted, their plan so far was to just burn it bonfire-style. I told him I understood his difficult situation, but that I was not going to pay for wood that the park doesn't want anyway, especially since me taking the wood off the Kelly road actually helps their clean-up process free of charge.

The park biologist told me he would put one of his assistants on solving the dilemma, and that I should contact her. I did a few days later, and she said that she needed a little time to sort things out, and would get back to me. I reminded her that it was November, and that after our first snowstorm hits moving or using the wood would be considerably more difficult.

During the next week, park employees picked up all the wood along the Kelly road and trucked it to the Kelly dump (still in the Park), about one mile from our town. The wood was now in a huge jumbled pile about thirty feet wide by forty feet long. The posts and beams were all mixed together, but one could still identify each by the length of the pole. I called the park assistant again, and reminded her that we would like to use some of the untreated wood to heat our home. She got back to me a couple of days later, saying that she had found a solution. For starters, because the wood was deemed to have value (because of my request to use it), it still had to be sold. She decided that she would put up flyers in the town of Kelly, inviting residents to bid on the wood. The park would then choose one of the bids, and the recipient would get the wood. One caveat, the recipient had to clean up all the wood in the pile, so that the park would not have to spend federal dollars managing a burn of the left-overs.

What? I reminded her that half the wood - the posts - were treated and unburnable indoors. What was someone supposed to do with hundreds of treated posts? Bring them to their own yard and have a huge (and toxically colorful) bonfire? Truck them down to the nearest landfill 150 miles away? It was at this point that I realized that these Park officials had a disconnect between their desks and this pile of wood. She told me she did not even know that any of it was treated, much less half. I also reminded her that this is a huge amount of wood all dumped into a jumbled pile. Unlike when it was laying along the Kelly road, picking horizontal beams out of the pile will not be easy, and cleaning up the whole pile quite a tremendous task. I asked, have you had a look at this pile? No. She only knew it was at the Kelly dump, and asked just how big it was. Miss, this pile is nearly as tall as a two story building. Even if or when you give us permission to take the wood, one house will likely not take all of the horizontal beams. Furthermore, winter weather is on the way, and certainly will hit before this whole bidding and selection process is complete. Nonetheless, she decided to go forward with her plan.

The next morning our first snowstorm hit, dumping two feet in the mountains and about four inches in Kelly. Kelly has a main street, and two side streets. There are a few dozen houses, one closed-down store, and a miniature post office. There were no flyers anywhere. A second snowstorm hit later that week.

On Monday of the following week I had to conduct a bird survey just north of town. When I headed out our cabin door that morning it was -6 degrees Fahrenheit. An hour and half later, I had walked to and was standing at one of the survey locations about three miles from Kelly. By now it had warmed to zero degrees. The wind had picked up, though, and was searing my cheeks. I was freezing cold.

This is when my moment of irony occurred: I was scanning the landscape with binoculars, searching for animals, nearly shivering, and wiggling my toes in my boots to reassure myself that they were okay, when I spotted a giant orange banner in the far distance. I steadied myself, and refocused to discover that I was in fact watching the fence pile burning at the Kelly dump. There it was, burning away. The flames were over 80 feet high, licking the freezing air with lashes of heat. Standing there, three miles away, I was watching the largest bonfire I had ever seen in my life, while my extremities grew numb from the freezing air.

It seems that the Park could conserve natural resources, but could not navigate well enough through its own beaurocratic traffic jam to responsibly manage a pile of wood. Instead, the red-tape held strong, and the Grand Teton National Park ended up lighting and having to manage a bonfire that they did not even want to deal with in the first place. All the while, they were depriving us of wood to heat our homes. I stood there in the snow that morning, cold wind hitting my cheeks, fingers and toes growing numb, and stared through my binoculars at the flames stretching skyward, sending all that heat, that precious heat, into the frozen Wyoming air.