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Photo Gallery: Wildfires

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Writer/poet Jack Kerouac once spent a summer as a National Park Service fire scout in this one-room cabin atop Desolation Peak in Washington's North Cascades National Park. For decades, a policy of suppressing all forest fires allowed too much fuel—dead wood, underbrush, and small trees—to build up on public lands. The Park Service now promotes "using fire as a land management tool," so long as human life isn't threatened. Photograph by David Pluth