Last Fall's Fire on Kennedy Peak

While we were hiking Kennedy Peak last weekend, as we approached the summit we came to an area that had burned during the fall fires.  There were three fires that I recall, and I posted on several of them back then.  I think the Kennedy Peak fire was in a November post, linked below.

The fire line extended for quite a bit of the ridge, and then down the hill on the east side, as far as we could tell.  It appeared that the west side of the trail along the ridge had only limited fire damage that didn't appear to extend far downhill, as if the fire fighters had used the trail and the ridge itself as a fire break.  Overall, I learned this one covered less than 100 acres, so it was the smallest of the three fires.

On Sunday I spoke with my neighbor Dan about the fires and finding the damage up there along the summit.  He mentioned that one of the assignments he has is to coordinate map production for fire fighting activities, as well as for reporting them after the fact.  As the conversation continued, we recalled three fires from last fall that I blogged about and that he had reported through the USFS/NPS coordination process, and he offered to share the maps he'd made in PDF.  The Kennedy Peak map is below:

The map marks the furthest extent of the fire, and also notes some of the fighting strategy that was used during the course of the fire, including drop points, and fall backs if weather made fire control difficult.

As you can see, the fire did slightly cross the ridge on the west side of the peak, but it did not spread far into the valley behind.  I remembered that after we walked through the burned areas along the trail on the ridge, once we made our turn to the west, our route went outside of the burn area and below it.  There was hardly a trace of it afterwards.

Dan shared two other maps, I'll work up some posts on them next week.

Here's the original link to my post on the Kennedy Peak fire - although I didn't call it that in the first post.  I actually didn't realize it was a separate fire from one of the earlier ones.

http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2010/11/gwnfmassanutten-fire-update-11-19.html