In the second part of our look at the Rocky Mount fire, WMRA’s Jordy Yager treks into the backcountry with park rangers to see the long-term effects of the second largest blaze to ever hit the Shenandoah National Park.
Sound of us walking along a trail
SALLY HURLBERT: So look over here. See, the fire only went up the tree a little ways.
Sally Hurlbert is a Management Specialist with the Shenandoah National Park. We’re walking along a trail near the Brown Mountain Overlook. Just six months ago, this area was engulfed in fire.
HURLBERT: So here we go, this little area right here was what we would consider a high-intensity burn. So several of these trees have died, not all of them though, that’s what’s interesting. You can have two trees right next to each other and one died and one didn’t.
Back in April, the Rocky Mount fire burned through more than 10,000 acres of the park in less than two weeks.
HURLBERT: And see how high up the black area is on the trees? That just shows you how high the fire went. It actually crowned in those trees. And that’s just not all that typical for oak trees to do that. But it was so dry.
More than 350 fire fighters coming from over 30 states fought the blaze, at a cost of nearly $4 million. But now, the park is bouncing back. Hurlbert pulls out a picture taken just days after the fire. It shows a hillside of charred stumps and blackened brush. Today that very same hillside is flush with green and abundant vegetation. And it’s not just plants and trees that are coming back.
HURLBERT: I was just gonna go turn over a rock or two and see if we can see anything. You have to come really close, but there’s a little millipede baby. Tiny little guy.
JORDY YAGER: Now, what does that tell you?
HURLBERT: That tells me that they can hide under the rocks and fire burns over and around them. But as long as they’re underground, it’s cooler, it’s wetter under a rock, so it’s easier for little things to survive.
And where little things survive, bigger things do too.
HURLBERT: Okay, so here is an example of where a bear has rolled a rock. The rock used to be right there, and now it’s rolled over. So it’s looking for food here in the burn area.
With about one to two bears per square mile in the park, wildlife specialists estimate that perhaps 15 to 20 bears were displaced by the blaze. But animals have pretty good instincts when it comes to fire, even when they’re caused by humans, as rangers say this likely was. Also, they say, not all fires are all bad.
ANDY RUTH: This area hasn’t burned in so long, it helped to clear out those hazardous fuels that had built up for a number of years. So a fire that occurs in the future now will have less to burn.
Andy Ruth is a fire ecologist planner with the National Park Service. Ruth explains that fire actually helps some trees reproduce. Shenandoah is home to several types of pines that have what are called serotinous cones — pine cones that require fire to open up and regenerate.
RUTH: In addition to that, it helps to kill in these oak areas, a lot of — sometimes maples will come in and start dominating these areas. So it helps to girdle these maples and allow for oak species to come in and regenerate.
For centuries fire was an integral part of forest management. But in 1910 that all changed, as nearly three million acres burned uncontrollably over two days in Montana, Idaho and Washington, killing 87 people in the process. In the decades following, federal policy shifted dramatically towards minimizing fires and safeguarding against potential casualties.
The park still does regular prescribed burns though, Ruth says, waiting for the exact right weather and conditions so as to control the blaze as best as possible.
RUTH: So you may have an area that hasn’t burned in a number of years. And so there might be a lot of dead and downed woody debris that you need to consume…. A lot of these systems around here, like the oak systems, are fire tolerant and they existed with fire historically, and so to perpetuate the oaks, you need to burn them.
The typical natural time between fires is 3 to 10 years, say Ruth and Hurlbert.
HURLBERT: And that’s also why we think the Rocky Mount fire burned so much hotter than normal, because there hadn’t been a fire in there in 80 years or more, and so that fuel load had built up to a catastrophic level.
With another fire season upon us, Ruth and Hurlbert are getting ready to give a talk next week when they’ll review some of the lessons learned from the Rocky Mount fire, looking especially at the role that social media plays in spreading information and misinformation about blazes.
The talk is scheduled for Wednesday, November 9th at 7pm at the St. Mark Lutheran Church in Charlottesville.
