Sunfish Pond Fire Redux

I have been meaning to write about the Sunfish Pond Fire, that burned 250 acres in early August. You may recall that I last wrote about the Sunfish Pond Fire on Sept 6, 2010, where I wrote about a scenic flight I took over Sunfish Pond.

For those of you who keep track of such things, the date on the image from Google Earth (above) is August 30, 2010. I recognized the burn area from the aerial photographs I took in mid-August. The area circled in blue is the approximate location of the start of the Sunfish Pond Fire. The red line is the Appalachian Trail (available as an overlay for Google Earth).

Sometime in mid August, I took a hike up the Douglas Trail (see the pin in the image above) where it ends at the Appalachian Trail on the ridge. I climbed about 1,000 feet in approximately 1.5 miles. Roughly 1/3rd of the way into the hike, I ran into what seemed to be evidence of a fire. As I continued up the trail, it became clear to me that this was probably the Sunfish Pond Fire. For much of the hike, the burn area was only on one side of the trail. The first two images below were taken on the hike up to the ridge and the last was on the hike down.

A few days after my hike I had a conversation with someone at the Worthington State Forest. I wanted to know if the burned area that I saw during my hike on the Douglas Trail was indeed the area burned by the Sunfish Pond Fire. It was. About three weeks later I got a copy of a map of the hiking trails in Worthington State Forest where someone with an approximation of the boundaries of the fire drawn on the map. Also indicated on this map was the approximate location of the start of the fire.

Between the map that I got from from Worthington State Forest, my own hike up to the ridge on the Douglas Trail, and other accounts of the fire, I was able to do a very crude outline of a portion of the burn area on the topo map (using an overlay available for Google Earth) below. It is not meant to be an accurate depiction of the outline of the burned area. Rather, my intent is to give those of you who are not familiar with this area of NJ and idea of what fire fighters from the NJ Forest Fire Service were up against. As you can see, it is steep. You can't really tell from the image below, but the fire was located in a remote and difficult to access area on the ridge.