SHEN Fire Update and a Look Back at Two GWNF Fires

(Photo is of the Burners Gap Fire in Fall 2010) After the precipitation Sunday night/Monday morning, the fire up in Shenandoah National Park was easier to manage. According to the incident page, the fire was 50% controlled as of yesterday evening, allowing the crews on the Valley Complex Fire to reprioritize their efforts, while continuing some mop up activities. The link is here: http://www.inciweb.org/incident/2150/ ; the weather also closed Skyline Drive for its length yesterday.


For the remainder of today’s post, I wanted to get back to the two GWNF fires from last fall, a topic I had started last week after walking through the aftermath of the Kennedy Peak fire on the way to that summit.

The first one to recall was called the Lokey Hollow fire, as I was driving to the Park’s Elkton entrance one morning for a hike I saw it smoking away over to the west. It was around Newport and I was worried that it might be close to the area where the old furnace is, so I drove back in as far as I could to check it out. The original post is at http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2010/10/fire-on-massanutten-mountain.html  - and I put up a couple of updates along the way during the month of November.

As the map shows, this fire expanded to about 600 acres, which means it was only a third the size of the Lands Run fire in the Park. The terrain is more difficult back there and that may have helped not only to control it but also slow the burn…just a hypothesis on my part. However, the fire took a long time to burn itself out, and about a week after it started the firefighters went back in to do a controlled burn to take away fuel for it. That step was the final thing they needed to put that one out.

The final fire I have info about is the Burners Gap Fire, which also happened in November. I remember this one well, it appears to be the one that I saw from Stoneyman in this post http://hawksbillcabin.blogspot.com/2010/11/gwnfmassanutten-fire-view-from-stonyman.html  - pretty dramatic, rising up the mountain there behind the Wal-Mart.

Again, this fire consumed similar acreage to the Lokey Hollow Fire. I assume that the fire was a bit more accessible, it appears to be so on the map we have, however, it did expand up and over the ridge down into Duncan Hollow.

It will be interesting to keep an eye on this subject for the next year. Mainly I’d like to know if it is just a coincidence that the fires I learned about occurred on the eastern slopes of Massanutten and the western slopes of the Blue Ridge – is that simply because of our vantage point in Page Valley, or are there forces of nature, like winds or sunshine, that make these slopes more susceptible.

A final note to close the post, thanking Dan over at NPS for sharing the maps. These were pretty insightful; it was very interesting to have a look back at them.

I’m hoping to hear the good news that the Valley Complex Fire is out and the incident ended soon, that will be my next and final post on that topic.