In October 1997, I attended a conference in Park City, Utah on the Future of Wildland Fire Research. Billed as 'an experiment, a beginning,' this seminal workshop developed action plans to create an interdepartmental competitive grants program, a coordinated response to managing fire regimes for ecosystem health, and a framework for management and research collaboration that would integrate the social sciences and assess ecological risk. Here, I will draw on my own personal journey over the past 15 years to (1) identify where we may have succeeded or failed; (2) speculate about unasked questions and hidden surprises; and (3) offer a few ideas for novel action plans, and a way to implement them, to help anticipate and manage wildland fire in a changing and nonstationary world. This presentation was given at the AFE SW Fire Ecology Conference, February 29, 2012 in Santa Fe, New Mexico.