Mountain area will benefit from prescribed burns

The Grandfather Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service, an area that includes 330,360 acres southeast of the Blue Ridge Parkway between Blowing Rock and Black Mountain, will receive $605,000 for a forest restoration project.

The work will triple the amount of prescribed burns, improve water quality of Wilson Creek and fight the Hemlock woolly adelgid, a sap-sucking bug that has decimated the hemlock population.

The district includes Linville Gorge, Wilson Creek, Table Rock and Brown Mountain. While Grandfather Mountain is one of the most prominent peaks that can be seen from the area, most of Grandfather Mountain is not in the Grandfather Ranger District.

About 192,000 acres of the district are national forest or federal land, while other lands in the district are privately owned or state lands or have conservation easements. The $605,000 awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture will pay for work only on federal lands, but the Forest Service plans to work with other landholders in the district, which includes parts of Avery, Burke, Caldwell, McDowell and Watauga counties.

The primary goal is to increase the number of prescribed burns. The Forest Service may typically burn about 2,000 acres a year and will increase that this year to 6,507 acres.

The district is hoping to receive about $500,000 a year through 2020, with plans to improve more than 36,000 acres with prescribed burns over 10 years.

Burning under controlled conditions reduces underbrush and dead trees that can fuel wildfires. Controlled burns are monitored and take place under certain temperatures and weather patterns.

"If we're burning under these conditions, ideally we should get the results we want and lessen the probability of a catastrophic wildfire," said John Crockett, Grandfather district ranger.

Fighting wildfires costs millions of dollars in the district. The 2007 Pinnacle fire that burned about 2,000 acres, caused by an arsonist, cost about $1.8 million to fight. The Linville Shortoff fire, caused by a lightning strike, and the Dobson Knob fire, both in 2007, burned a combined 6,350 acres and cost $6.9 million to fight.

An additional benefit of a prescribed burn is that certain species need fire to survive.

For instance, the mountain golden heather, found in only two spots in the world, both in the Grandfather Ranger District, is a low-growing, rocky-area shrub that benefits from fire, Crocket said. Fire cleans off competing vegetation and gets rid of plants that create too much shade for the mountain golden heather. Certain species of conifers need fire for their cones to open and disperse their seeds.

Hemlock soil injections use chemicals to make the trees more resistant to the Hemlock woolly adelgid. The number of acres treated will more than double this year to 250.

The reforestation plan was developed in cooperation with a number of environmental and conservation groups, including some groups that several years ago were opponents of the Forest Service's timber harvest in the Globe area of the Pisgah National Forest near Blowing Rock. The environmentalists and Forest Service reached an accord last year about reducing the planned timber harvest, which was completed a few weeks ago.

Among a dozen signatories pledging support for the agreement were representatives of Wild South, WildLaw, the Nature Conservancy, the National Wild Turkey Federation and the N.C. Division of Forest Resources.

WildLaw was an Asheville-based environmental law firm that closed this past year, but while he worked there as a biologist, Josh Kelly drafted the grant application in collaboration with the Forest Service and other environmental groups.

Kelly, now a public lands biologist for the Western North Carolina Alliance, said Forest Service employees and the environmentalists got to know one another better and worked together to improve the forest and water quality.

"If it really does improve the quality of the forest, you take away the objections people had to (things like) the Globe timber sale," he said. The groups met early last year and talked about what they wanted to accomplish.

"The only things that ended up in this grant were the things we all agreed on," Kelly said.