Burning Big Meadows
Fire Management O cer Dave Robinson briefs his team on prescribed burn protocols at Big Meadows on Tuesday.
Around midmorning on Tuesday, a young woman in a long white dress and a young man in a suit posed for a photographer at Big Meadows on the Skyline Drive. Less than 200 yards away, Dave Robinson was briefing his fire management team on the plan for the day’s prescribed burn. “Expect the unexpected,” Robinson said. “For instance, there’s a wedding couple in the burn unit. Be prepared for anything, and we can quickly adapt.”
Within the hour, Big Meadows was cordoned off and park visitors watched from a safe distance on the lawn of the Harry F. Byrd Visitors Center as Robinson’s team, made up of firefighters from the Shenandoah National Park as well as the National Capital Area and the US Forest Service, ignited a 50-acre section of the popular grassy plain.
The widest open area in the Shenandoah National Park, Big Meadows has been maintained as an open landscape by human intervention for centuries, first by Native Americans and then by European settlers.
“The meadow is a cultural landscape and so it is managed for its cultural significance. All of the evidence
that we have is that the meadow has been here historically,” said Claire Comer, interpretive specialist for the Shenandoah National Park and a native of Page County.
Meadows that are historically cultivated out of forested areas rarely stabilize themselves on their own — usually shrubs and bushes will encroach, followed by taller trees, in a natural process called succession. And for the park, protecting Big Meadows, a place with historical significance that is beloved by park visitors, is a top priority.
It was in Big Meadows where, when the Shenandoah National Park was established
in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt stood on a stage and dedicated the park to “this and succeeding generations of Americans for the recreation and the re-creation.”
To preserve the meadow habitat, the Shenandoah National Park’s management plan has divided the 150-acre area into thirds, and every year, land managers burn a third, mow a third and let one third lie fallow. “That keeps the woody plants from growing up and the more invasive pioneer species from taking hold so we can maintain the openness of the meadow,” Comer explained.
That’s the plan, anyway — but fire
managers have to wait for the conditions to be just right in order to carry out a burn. In 2018, the park saw 99 inches of precipitation, almost double the normal 52. That made it impossible to set the meadows ablaze, delaying the rotation a year.
The middle section of the meadow, which they burned earlier this week, encompasses a small wetland where 10 percent of the park’s endangered and rare plant species are thriving, Comer said. Robinson’s team made sure to work around the wetland area to prevent any damage to the sensitive marshy area.
Jessica Kusky, an interpretive ranger at the Shenandoah National Park said planning a prescribed burn like this one can take months. “It takes coordination on many different levels, with many different agencies, and with many different people within the park,” she said. “This is something that was planned and that we have a lot of control over.”