'Big Burn' on PBS depicts 1910 disaster that shaped Forest Service

It’s no spoiler to give away the ending of “The Big Burn” – the fire dies and the U.S. Forest Service lives. But that doesn’t mean the PBS documentary based on Tim Egan’s book by the same name doesn’t leave us with an unresolved cliffhanger. “It’s not surprising the fires of 1910 cast such a huge shadow on the Forest Service and had such an effect going forward,” said film writer and director Stephen Ives. “What should have been the Forest Service’s worst hour turned out to be their creation myth – forest rangers as American heroes. But I think to be fair, something like the Big Burn was so unprecedented, it couldn’t have been imagined. It ultimately revealed the flaws and complicated contradictions at the heart of our forest policy.” The hourlong "American Experience" program debuts next Tuesday at 7 p.m. It recounts the founding days of the Forest Service, when it was a collection of Ivy League college grads trying to impose order on 200 million acres of newly created national forests. They’d barely had time to rile the rowdies in logging towns like Taft and Wallace when the worst fire season North America has ever recorded blew up around them...more