Contemporary discussion of fire management is dominated by the merger of a wilderness tradition with that of a fire tradition. Wilderness fire management is not just the restoration of a natural process to a natural environment. It involves the merging of one hybrid of nature and culture, fire, with that of another hybrid of nature and culture, wilderness. Because they evolved more or less independently, the conjunction of these two traditions has yielded a thicket of operational dilemmas and intellectual paradoxes. This association will not endure in its present form: there will continue to be fires in wilderness settings that require management, but wilderness fire as a special philosophical concern and as a domineering phase of wildland fire management will pass.