Robert Garcia was standing inside a corrugated metal garage on the edge of the nation’s newest national park as long-needed rain fell outside, having just returned from a mostly-contained fire site.
A week before, New River Gorge had seen an early start to fire season on Sept. 12. The flames on Beury Mountain were in a remote and steep area of the park.
When the fire started, Garcia had been over 1,500 miles away, at his Bureau of Land Management crew’s home base of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Then came a call for help that closer crews couldn’t answer.
“It’s just a phone call saying, ‘Hey, we got picked up. We’re gonna be headed over,” Garcia remembered.
Six firefighters who comprise what’s called “severity detail” then took a three-day cross-country road trip from New Mexico to the Appalachians in their mountain-specialized type six fire engine, joining the home crew of firefighters at New River Gorge in the midst of a tense fire season.
In federal lands like the New River Gorge, firefighters are part of a national response force, with crews shared between several federal organizations and coordinated through the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC). When the Beury Mountain Fire started, New River Gorge’s home crew was deployed to fight it, leaving a vulnerable region of mountains suffering from drought unprotected if another blaze broke out.
While the West has seen larger, more frequent, and more destructive fires, West Virginia is part of a tightly populated Appalachian range experiencing an increasing number of droughts and fires. In the wake of the Steep Valley fire that burned over 2,200 acres around New River Gorge last November — a fire that saw an influx of several out-of-state crews — the future of fire seasons in the park places West Virginia in the middle of a tightly-stretched web of federal resources.
The ‘Fire Bug’
Along the edge of a wall in the cache that divides indoor workout equipment from a computer desk, patches are stacked from floor to ceiling with embroidered labels from Texas to Canada.
“Our people travel all over the country, and people will come here, and they’ll leave their patches here,” Thomas Fielden, a Fire Management Officer for the NPS Allegheny Zone, explained as he gave a tour of the cache’s equipment.
At New River Gorge, that equipment includes leaf blowers — a staple of establishing fire lines in leafy Eastern woodlands that Fielden said often surprises Western firefighters — and red bags — packed with supplies like sleeping bags and ready-to-eat meals for indeterminate assignments to fight wildfires in the field.
When wildfire firefighters join any federal force, they receive “red card” training, standardized across the country. This shared training is what allows firefighters like Garcia to quickly arrive on a wildfire scene and enter a dangerous firefighting situation — often in an entirely new ecosystem and with an entirely new team — with certain organizational and safety procedures shared between crews.
Garcia said his first assignment after training was Virginia. And while he’s more used to Ponderosa stands or grasslands than acres of volatile hickories and oaks, each ecosystem is varied, with local challenges. The commonality is the firefighting force itself, a community he called “an incredibly small world.”
“It’s sort of like a bug that kind of bites you, and there’s nothing else really like this,” Garcia said, describing the beginning of his firefighting career. “There’s a lot of trust and sort of a brotherhood that comes in here. And back to the safety aspect of it, you start considering your life and well-being, and you have to put that in another person’s hand, just as they’re going to do that for you.”
Rebecca McDade, a seasonal employee with the New River Gorge crew, also described the “bug bite for fire” amid a “mutual learning environment.” With the variety of different firefighting backgrounds and levels of experience, different crew members are on alert for different hazards and opportunities.
“This is the first time that I’ve worked with folks from New Mexico, and as with any other resources that we’ve had come to help us at the park, they’ve all had some special insights and unique advice,” McDade said. “And it’s interesting to see, when you have resources of different backgrounds and different skill sets working together, they all have something unique to offer.”
There is a Western concentration in the federal force in the West. Fielden himself started firefighting out West before moving East to live closer to his wife’s family. He explained the NPS often trains people from entry-level positions to full staff federal firefighters, a career route that allows for travel and job security. But recruitment has been gearing up nationwide, with the Appalachian Conservation Corps launching specific campaigns to recruit women and veterans.
For Garcia and McDade, their jobs have opened opportunities not just for community but for travel. Garcia, in his first year as a firefighter, said the New River Gorge assignment marked his first time in a national park. McDade said the lure of travel was part of what drew her to return for her second season.
“I’m not sure how much traveling I would have gotten in if it wasn’t for this job,” McDade said, describing her assignments that ranged from Colorado to Texas last season. “It’s not just, ‘What do I need to know for the job?’ You also get to experience more outside of just wherever you might work otherwise.”
West Virginia In The National Fire Landscape
The NIFC has pooled national resources under various names and scopes from its Boise, Idaho headquarters since 1965. However, a turning point for national firefighting came with the 2000 National Fire Plan. After a record-breaking series of fire seasons, the national Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior released the National Fire Plan that August. Their guidance outlined how the national firefighting force needed more funding and efficiencies in resources to fight high-risk fires, with increasing populations in fire prone areas, especially in the West.
“Many western forests and rangelands provide a backdrop for this population movement,” the NFP read. “Prior to European settlement, these areas frequently experienced low, slow-burning fire. Decades of aggressive fire suppression, combined with rural residential development, have drastically changed the look of western forests and rangelands and the way fires behave.”
Without enough funding, even with increased permanent hiring to sustain sufficient firefighting crews in all areas that could need them come fire season, the report outlined a system which Fielden says prioritized keeping crews at high-alert, the most efficient way to use resources, spread out and managed by moving resources across the country to address fires.
“All of that helped, but we’re still having large fires, and they’re getting harder to contain,” Fielden said.
With worsening fires, the same two federal departments intermittently update the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy, which Fielden said has meant “moving firefighters across the country more and more to fill in those gaps” within the last decade.
Shane McDonald, the US Fish and Wildlife Service representative at the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group for the NIFC, said the NIFC is designed to handle the load of moving firefighting resources.
“The fires become larger and grow quicker and burn hotter,” McDonald said. “But forever, even before current days, times, every [NIFC] agency that we talked about earlier, they don’t have enough funding to have all the assets on site all the time to successfully extinguish and manage every fire that pops up within their jurisdiction.”
McDonald said it’s common for firefighters to travel anywhere from Alaska to New Zealand. But this year has been a period when “resources get stretched pretty thin,” McDonald said, meaning that while the NIFC has enough resources to address wildfires, responding to those fires has required “additional logistic support.”
“We have enough assets to tackle any fire that pops up and then on the appeal, preparedness level five, upper end of the scale, like we’re currently in, we have to really be thoughtful and mindful of how resources are prioritized to certain geographic areas,” McDonald said.
The Appalachains have long-seen settlements into and around mountainous areas that make firefighting difficult – with various industrial and climate changes accompanying those settlements.
“In West Virginia and across Appalachia in general, fire history is a human story,” Concord University Professor of Geography Thomas Saladyga said.
Saladyga has studied the New River Gorge for years, research that has intersected with the history of people living, mining, and leaving West Virginia’s mountains.
“Data in our recent paper indicate that fire activity in pine woodlands peaked during the 1920s-1940s and declined rapidly after the closure of mines in the 1950s and loss of population in subsequent decades,” Saladyga wrote in an Oct. 3 email to WVPB in reference to a 2024 study, published in collaboration with a NPS scientist. “So, while the last few years are concerning with regard to wildfire, the broader picture is that fire activity during the federal management era (since 1978) has been nowhere near what it was during the early 20th century or even late 19th century.”
Those last few years have seen both drought and spiking visitation to New River Gorge since shifting from a national river to a national park designation in 2021. In 2023, visitation to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve reached 1,709,623 people, according to NPS numbers. That means the number of people who visited New River Gorge in 2023 is approximately equal to the total population of West Virginia.
All of those changes mean the state is entering a firefighting scene that is working to adapt those resources to a different local fire culture and awareness.
NPS Interpretation Officer Dave Bieri said images of firefighters with drip torches – handheld canisters that drop diesel and gasoline, sometimes also used to establish fire lines – posted to the park’s social media often spur public misinterpretation. Amid calls for firefighting resources, public comments will ask why firefighters are worsening fires. But controlled burns mimic indigenous practices for years before European settlement of the Appalachains, after which colonial fire suppression has left vegetation build-up ripe for wide-scale, destructive fire.
Michelle Faherty is a fuels specialist at the park, leading a growing program for year-round fire preparation and management through clearing vegetation that fuels fires. Firefighters will either clear vegetation through mechanical thinning, more common around historic structures the NPS protects as part of its mission of cultural history preservation, or through controlled burns.
For example, Fielden said preemptive thinning prevented serious damage after a recent fire around the Nuttallburg historic coal mining town. It’s a year-round approach the park is looking to ramp up alongside concerted natural resource protection like treating invasive species.
“When we’re not fighting fire, we’re not just here twiddling our thumbs or cleaning our engines,” Faherty said.
Droopy Laurels, Burning Moss, And Historic Drought
“We had early coloration, starting with the leaves and just all of our laurels, they were just all droopy and folded over,” Faherty said. “So it’s definitely some of the worst conditions that I have seen since I’ve been working here.”
Faherty has worked at the park for nearly a decade. She said, typically, fires in Appalachia are fueled by surface vegetation. But the fire that prompted the call to New Mexico had burned through the “duff,” deeper levels of vegetation. Faherty said the atypical fire season is apparent throughout the park. Midway through the cache tour, Faherty pulled out a video on her phone of something she had not seen before: moss burning.
Fall fire season officially began for West Virginia in October and will extend through December, with a statewide burn ban from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fielden said that on the Keetch-Byram drought index, which ranges from 0 to 800, a reading above 325 at New River Gorge indicates fires in the region will be “difficult to contain and control.” In September, the index had reached 400 for New River Gorge. As of late October, after rainfall, New River Gorge was in the 300 or less range, and the severity detail had moved onto Michigan.
However, the firefighting resources available to New River Gorge depend on its federal management. Eastern areas of the state, where federal resources aren’t available, remain in “severe” to “exceptional” drought conditions. Instead, like most of the state, those areas depend on local and state firefighting resources — forces, including many volunteers, that have seen tightening budgets and limited resources.
