Gatlinburg

Three weeks ago, the spate of wildfires that had plagued the Southern Appalachians for over a month took an especially tragic turn when one of them struck the resort town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

The various fires in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina had already burned a significant amount of forest land, produced a lot of aggravating smoke, and even forced a few small communities to take the precaution of evacuating, but as far as I know had not previously destroyed structures or taken human lives.

That changed with the Chimney Tops 2 fire, so named because it was the second wildfire to originate at Chimney Tops, a prominent pinnacle shaped mountain. It swept down the western slopes of the Smoky Mountains on the back of 80-mph (130-kph) gusts of wind and devastated parts of Gatlinburg and its surroundings, incinerating or damaging some 1600 buildings and leaving at least 14 people dead.

It seemed unimaginable that the normally damp, even soggy, Smoky Mountains could spawn a blaze big enough and wild enough to ravage an entire town. (Those mountains get their name not from smoke, but rather from fog and mist.) But it did, thanks to unprecedented drought conditions in the Southeast. In the wake of the fire, Gatlinburg and the national park that is the town’s lifeblood were mostly closed to the public for over a week, also highly unprecedented.

More than any of the almost yearly big wildfires typical of the American West, this tragedy hit home for me, since I have a long, intimate history with that part of Tennessee.

Unlike the world-famous Yellowstone and Grand Canyon national parks, the Great Smoky Mountains park, which straddles the Tennessee-North Carolina state line and is a little smaller than Lapland’s Urho Kekkosen Kansallispuisto, probably isn’t familiar to folks in Finland.

Yet it is the most-visited park in the United States, a destination for some nine million tourists, picnickers, campers, hikers, or mere sightseers every year. Luckily, for the sake of the park’s endless wild spaces, the majority of this vast horde of people never ventures more than a few steps from their cars, leaving most of the park untouched by humans.

Most of this recreational car traffic moves over the Newfound Gap Road, a two-lane highway that cuts the park in half as it crosses over the spine of the Smoky Mountain range. At either end of this winding 34-mile (55-kilometer) road lies two tourist towns hugging the very edge of the park boundaries.

The one on the east, Cherokee, North Carolina, within the Eastern Cherokee Indian Reservation, always had a tacky feel to it, at least when I was a kid. Along the main street fronted by cheap souvenir shops, you could see black bears in cages and local Cherokee men oddly decked out in Plains Indian war bonnets, all for the sake of attracting and amusing tourists. There was an atmosphere of a carnival midway. 

(This made Cherokee the perfect setting, I guess, for the final scenes of German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s iconic movie “Stroszek”, which weirdly enough includes an arcade chicken dancing to corny music.)

On the other hand, Gatlinburg, at the other end of the Newfound Gap road, to me always had a more up-scale vibe to it, though the town (with a current population of about 4000, about the same as Lapland's Ivalo) did exhibit some symptoms of a tourist trap, such as a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum. 

My first visit there was when I was very young, maybe just a new-born. According to family lore, my parents had such a hard time finding a place to stay that they finally had to settle for a motel so run-down you could see the stars through the holes in the roof.

Things were a bit more prosperous there when I started making my own visits, back in high school and college, and my memories of the place are all good. By that time, my buddies and I were making epic hiking trips in the Smokies, in summer but later also in winter. At the end of some of the winter trips, after a few nights sleeping in tents in below-freezing temperatures, we would drive down to Gatlinburg to check into a motel.

Having just finished walking in the woods for a few days, once in Gatlinburg we naturally switched gears and spent our time walking around the town. I remember wandering around little pedestrian alleyways, deserted, the shops closed, the cold nighttime air filled with music, probably Christmas music, piped in through hidden speakers. It was a nice solitary atmosphere.

I also remember driving into Gatlinburg on a rainy night at the end of December. After coming down the mountain, enveloped in the deep blackness of dense woods in every direction, we ran -- with almost no warning -- headlong into the blaring lights of the bustling resort town. It was startling. Since I wasn’t used to driving at night in unfamiliar places, I found it a bit nerve-wracking cruising down the street, the pavement wet and glistening in the confusion of lights, from traffic and shops, all the while keeping an eye out through the rain for tourists on the verge of stepping off the curb. It was in many ways a premonition of what driving is like in Helsinki in the depths of a November night, still unpleasant.

On that night, New Year’s Eve 1974, we hunkered down in our motel, and celebrated “camping-style”. We set up our little, Swedish-made Svea 123 hiking stove (I still have it!) on top of the motel-room cabinet and fired the thing up (talk about fire hazards) so we could boil tea water and make hot rum toddies. They put us in a holiday spirit, for sure.

By the next morning, temperatures had dropped and the streets of Gatlinburg were covered in a treacherous layer of ice. We put the tire chains on my father’s pick-up truck and left town heading downstream toward Pigeon Forge. As there was no way we were going to risk going back across the mountain, we had no choice but to return to Georgia along the around-about, low-land route. Somehow when I think back on that morning, I always hear in my mind Linda Ronstadt singing a plaintive song, something that must have been playing on the radio as we left.

A year or two later, we started making yearly family trips to Gatlinburg to ski at the nearby ski area, almost 1500 feet (460 meters) above town, called Ober Gatlinburg. Naturally. Underlining the European feel evoked by that Germanized name, the resort operates a giant aerial tramway, like you find in the Alps, that would take us directly from Gatlinburg’s main street up to the ski lodge. Our parents weren’t skiers themselves (far from it), but they were happy to indulge their children by arranging what became a family holiday tradition, one that I still have fond memories of.

Since those long-ago family trips, I’ve been to Gatlinburg only once or twice, the last time in 2001 with my own kids. We mostly just passed through. On a trip to Georgia last year, I could have visited the Smokies, driven over Newfound Gap and dropped into to Gatlinburg to get reacquainted.

But I didn’t, and now I regret that. If I ever get back there, even if it’s years from now, I’m afraid it will still feel forever changed by a tragic wildfire that no one expected. 

Gatlinburg, before the recent fire.
Photo: Bilnutne

The Chinese Wildfire Hoax

Friends and family back in Georgia have been dealing lately with something out of the ordinary and outside my own experience -- a series of big wildfires scattered all across the Southern Appalachian mountains. One of the fires, the Rough Ridge fire in the Cohutta Mountains, is said to be perhaps the largest in North Georgia's history. I've seen satellite images of smoke covering the northernmost third of the state, reaching down to Atlanta and Athens. It seems a bit unreal.

If it's the same Rough Ridge area that I once went camping with my father and brother, then it is some very rugged terrain firefighters have having to contend with.

Of course, in the heavily wooded mountains of Georgia and North Carolina, there have always been the occasional forest fire, though none from the past that really stand out in my mind.

Back in the days when my father was young, there was the habit of burning off the underbrush in the mountains in springtime, all the better for the grazing cattle that farmers let range freely during the summer. But that practice ended long before I was born.

As a kid, I can recall seeing just one wildfire, from a distance at night. It formed a crooked orange line in the dark as it burned on the side of Talona Mountain (which we called Reed Mountain, for some reason), an isolated "monadnock" that rose within easy viewing distance of my family's home.

And when I was in college at Young Harris, essentially at the base of Brasstown Bald, Georgia's highest peak, there was once a fire somewhere in the area. It was serious enough that the Forest Service asked for students to volunteer to help with the fire fighting. My classes wouldn't allow me to join, but some of my friends did and came back to school at the end of the day sooty and looking a bit exhilarated. I did envy them for the experience.

In any case, never when I was living in Georgia would there be so many fires burning at the same time, especially in November. Typically, autumns were coolish, and a bit wet, not what I would think of as fire season. 

The photos and reports that I'm seeing now seems like a smaller-scale version of something out of the American West, where fire is often enough an inescapable part of life. I know a family in Colorado who had to evacuate their house a few years ago due to an approaching fire and can still point to the spot just across the road where the flames thankfully came to a halt. And this is not not far from Storm King Mountain, where 14 firefighters lost their lives in 1994, a grim reminder of the deadly and destructive power of uncontrolled fire. 

A couple of years ago, we were driving across northern Arizona when the news came over the radio that 19 "hot shot" firefighters had similarly died at Yarnell Hill some 60 miles to the south of us. Later that night, we could see a small fire burning on Dean Peak in the Hualapai Mountains near Kingman, the faint smell of smoke noticeable in the car as as we sped down Interstate 40. 

Of course, fire is also a huge concern in Finland, a country made up almost entirely of forests. Fire prevention is taken very seriously here, and a typical feature of the evening news in summer is the latest update on which parts of the country are under metsäspalovaroitus ("forest fire warning"), when open fires in woodlands is strictly forbidden. Sometimes the entire country is under such a warning. That was surely the case in the summer of 2006, which was incredibly dry. Finland avoided major fires then, but even in Helsinki you could sometimes not avoid the smell of smoke reaching all the way from across the border in Russia, where numerous fires burned out of control for days, due to the lack of resources or motivation to extinguish them. 

Luckily, no lives or structures have been lost to the North Georgia blazes, and at the moment smoke is the biggest threat to people. But the smoke, if nothing else, is unpleasant and potentially unhealthy. The Atlanta area was placed under a Code Red air quality alert, indicating the smoke can be harmful for everyone, not only children and those with respiratory ailments. 

And conditions don't seem likely to improve. Apparently, there's a chance of rain this weekend for the area, but before that temperatures are still expected to reach 24 C (75 F), which to me seems unnaturally high for a week before Thanksgiving.

Nowadays, when every little thing gets politicized, I'm amazed I haven't yet seen anyone trying to score political points over these unprecedented wildfires, and I hesitate to do it myself (a bit).

I've always been extremely annoyed by conservative pundits or talk show hosts who poke fun at the notion of global warning wherever there is an usually big winter storm somewhere. Erick Erickson comes to mind, declaring something like, "Well, with all the snow covering Buffalo right now, it sure looks like 'Global Warming' to me. Ha, ha, ha!" Or something like that. Appealing to the common sense of the common man.

Hearing this kind of nonsense always makes me want to pull my hair out, thinking "No you idiot, you have to look at the trend, the overall trend. You can't look at just one isolated event and declare that climate change is bogus." Especially, when the event goes against the prevailing trend.

By the same token, you should also guard against making too much of an unusual weather pattern when it seems to confirm the reality of climate change. You never hear folks like Erick Erickson doing that.

That said, rare drought conditions and historically bad wildfires certainly seem to fit predictions of a rapidly warming planet. You would think the warm, tinder-dry conditions in the Southern Appalachians in late autumn would make local people, many of whom voted for Donald Trump, stop and consider that maybe this is a sign of global warming. Maybe it's not a Chinese hoax after all, despite what Trump has claimed over and over again.

You would think they might finally take the issue seriously and be alarmed that the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency might well be a climate change denier.

Or, maybe not. Maybe they'll just breathe in the pungent smell of burning timber and, with a sense of self-satisfaction, think to themselves, "Ah, nothing to worry about. That smells like Trump's America to me!"

Wildfire in California, 2008. 
Photo: Bureau of Land Management.