Forest Fires in Western North Carolina

I do not know how many of you have ever visited the mountains of Western North Carolina but we have some pretty rugged areas. Seems like the fires are in all of those. The picture is taken from Lake Lure where the movie Dirty Dancing was filmed. It is looking up at some of the cliffs overlooking the lake. There are million dollar homes up there that are probably going up in smoke. The other area with lots of fires is the Nantahala National Forest. That is the area where millions go to white water raft and kayak. Also the Joyce Kilmer National Forest is near by. It is the only virgin forest on the east coast. What make it so bad in those ares is the amount of dead trees from the Wolly Adelgia bug that sucked the life out of the Hemlocks. Some areas look like a war zone with all the dead and broken trees. Since Joyce Kilmer has rules that no trees can be cut or removed they are piled up and it will be bad. These are conifers so they burn fast and hot. There were over 549 firefighters on this one area last night trying to save homes. Many in that area have very little but the house they live in. It is impossible to fight the fires with the steep terrain equipment cannot get in too steep and cliffs everywhere. Men on foot do not last long.

Forest fires are good for the forest but they cannot be hot fires that kill the big trees. Just need enough to burn the underbrush and dead stuff. This is a blazing inferno with no end in sight. No rain in forecast.

We are over two feet behind on rain for the year. While building the garage it rained all the time until I got the roof on and now nothing. It is a dust bowl here. All the leaves are pretty much down so lots of tinder. I have waterlines on my property that cover it all and on city water so I will not loose pressure.

Feel bad for those poor mountain families that may loose everything they have. Wind gets up to 35 mph at times in some areas. It is not good to be outside in some areas the smoke looks like China.

Fires are indiscriminate, deadly, and devastating. My wife and I lost one house to fire, which was bad enough, dealing with the insurance company was worse.

Hope you're not in danger.

I didn't see anything on the national news this morning, must have been "trumped" by the political news.

Stay safe.

Its a natural cycle that needs to happen. The alternative would be to harvest the trees and restart the regeneration cycle however as you said someone has not allowed that.

Unfortunate for the families and houses in the area but with fire suppression, no harvest, and mass insect infestatuon this is bound to happen.

Oh, that's bad! Stay safe!!

Not good David,

Do your best to be safe and keep safe, and protect your love ones.

Greg.

Maybe your state will use this as a learning tool. Honestly in California it took a lot of large high end neighborhoods and hundreds of thousands of acres turned into ash over the past decade or so for salvage logging to be seen as a good thing. Out here we have huge amounts of standing dead from drought stressed trees finished off by beetles. It is a big problem to have that much dry fuel ready to go up at any time

Congress has to change law to cut even dead timber in the Joyce Kilmer. They do cut in the Pisgah National Forest. This is the worst drought on record I think and with warmer than normal temps it does not help. I think today we passed the previous record for 1st. killing frost. Still no frost. The farmers just plowed under the peppers and tomatoes and quit picking they never died.

We own a place in north Idaho and last years fire there and in western Washington were an absolute mess. I truly feel for you and those.