Please note, this event is sold out, but there are tickets available for upcoming Cody Culture Club programs at centerofthewest.org/codycultureclub.
Join us on select Thursdays January through April for Cody Culture Club. You’ll enjoy appetizers and cash bar at every program. If you love Cody, you’re part of the Club! Tickets for individual programs are $25 each, with discounts available with our package deal; details and online ticketing at centerofthewest.org/codycultureclub.
For our January 9 program, we’re looking back to the Yellowstone Fires of 1988 through the lenses of various people who have witnessed wildfire destruction firsthand. What were the lasting effects on the landscape? What have we learned about the ecology of Yellowstone and wildfire management?
• Bernie Spanogle – Operations and FBAN in 1988
• Nickolas Kichas – Fire Ecologist, Yellowstone National Park
• Beau Kidd – Deputy Fire Staff Officer, NFS, GYAN
• Kyle Miller – Wyoming Hot Shot Captain, photographer
• Roy Renkin joins the panel for Q&A – Retired Resource Management Specialist, Yellowstone National Park
Bernie Spanogle was a wildland firefighter assigned to the Wolf Lake Fire at Canyon Village in August of 1988 and responsible for the fire suppression efforts from Lake to Canyon Village. His historical, on-the-ground perspective transports the audience back to 1988, providing insights into what it was like to fight wildland fire at that time as well as the unusual and complex circumstances experienced during the ’88 fires.
Bernie graduated with a degree in Range Conservation from the University of Idaho in 1969 and served for 2 years as an Officer in the U.S. Army before signing up with the U.S. Forest Service in 1971. He spent 28 years with the Forest Service with assignments on the Boise, Bridger Teton, and Humboldt national forests, and as District Rangers on the Pawnee National Grasslands and the Blanco Ranger District, White River National Forest, both in Colorado. He moved to Cody in 1988 where he assumed a new position as the Resource Staff officer on the Shoshone National Forest. He retired in 1998 and has resided in Cody since. Bernie is blessed with his wife Edie, who was a schoolteacher in Cody, and a son and family who are stationed in the Alaska Air Guard, Anchorage, Alaska. Bernie comes with 30 years of experience and training in Wildfire suppression and management.
Beau Kidd currently serves as Deputy Fire Staff Officer for the Shoshone National Forest based out of Cody, Wyoming, and Operations Section Chief for the Rocky Mountain Area National Complex Incident Management Teams. In his 27 years of federal fire service, he has held positions with handcrews, hotshot crews, smokejumpers, and in various fire management functions. Beau has lived in Powell, Wyoming, for 18 years, working for both the Bighorn and Shoshone National Forests during that time. He grew up in Dubois, a small rural farm town in eastern Idaho, and went to college at Boise State University before deciding that an adventurous career as a wildland firefighter was the right path for him! A father of three beautiful girls, Beau spends most of his spare time farming, training horses, or enjoying all the outdoor activities this amazing area has to offer.
Nickolas Kichas is Fire Ecologist for Yellowstone National Park where he studies relationships between fire, vegetation, wildlife, and forest health. Nick received his PhD degree in Ecology and Environmental Science from Montana State University in 2022. Prior to that he received his B.S. degree in forestry and wildland fire management from Cal Poly Humboldt in 2016.
Nick has also worked as a researcher for the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Forest Service.
Kyle Miller started his career in wildland fire on the Lolo National Forest in Plains, Montana, in 2004. He carried an old Kodak disposable camera on his first assignment to a fire in Alaska but soon upgraded to a small digital point-and-shoot. After six seasons on a district crew in Plains, Kyle, wanting to be more involved in the active areas of wildfires, applied for and was hired by the Wyoming Hotshots as a seasonal crewmember. Limited by the images he could capture with the point-and-shoot, he bought an entry level DSLR camera and began learning manual shooting. Eventually Kyle began hitting limits of what his gear could do with nighttime wildfires, a favorite setting, so he began using a full frame DSLRr and carrying prime lenses to take advantage of the wider apertures. He also started focusing more on utilizing images for their educational aspects.
Now as a captain with the Wyoming Hotshots, Kyle is able to combine his operational understanding of wildfire tactics and strategies with photography for public education. His images show what the men and women working to suppress fires are experiencing. The current special exhibition, Fire on the Mountain, is a collection of some of his favorite images, printed on metal and displayed in burned wood frames he built himself, spanning the last decade.
Roy Renkin joined the National Park Service Forestry and Fire Management Program in Yellowstone National Park as a seasonal Forestry Technician in 1979, and retired in 2020 as the park’s Resource Management Specialist after 41 fire seasons. During the historic fire season of 1988, he was involved in on-site fire monitoring, aerial detection and mapping, and establishing long-term vegetation monitoring plots for research. The experience and subsequent fire seasons led to more than 25 publications in fire behavior and occurrence, forest ecology, and wildlife-vegetation relationships.
Blair Hotels
Carlene Lebous & Harris Haston
NextGen Park County
Simpson Gallagher Gallery
• February 13: Lock, Stock, and Local: Guns of the Cody Firearms Museum
• March 13: Dead & Gone in Wyoming: Mysterious Tales of True Crime in the Cowboy State
• April 10: Common Ground