Fire on the Mountain

Susan and I were on vacation last week at Lake Lure, NC. Wednesday, I was inside reading Hood and Scarlet by Stephen Lawhead most of the day. Late in the afternoon, while getting ready to go canoeing on the lake, I asked Susan if she heard a helicopter. She said she’d been hearing it all afternoon. When we were driving out to the canoe area, we saw smoke over toward Chimney Rock. So we drove there and saw smoke on the mountain and two helicopters with water buckets, trying to retard the fire’s growth.

Monday we had been walking, jogging, and reading along the Lake Lure Inn’s boardwalk and the city park. Susan guessed the helicopters might be fetching water close to where we had our devotions. We went there and found out she was right.

I took about 240 photos of the whirlybirds (as we called them when I was a boy) coming in for water, flying out, dumping, and coming back. It took just under three minutes for each circuit. I took most of the shots with the “sports” setting on my Nikon D40 and was impressed with how it stopped the action of the blades. Clicking through the pics later, it looked like a nickelodeon movie so I went ahead and made one for you to view. Click here to see it.

The fire was caused by a lightning strike and spread out to 250 acres of private and public lands in the Chimney Rock Park. The blaze started Tuesday, July 29th and as of Sunday, August 3rd, is still burning, though mostly contained.

I’ll spare you all of the shots that I took but here is one more that I liked because of the trail of water being left behind as the helicopter races back to the fire.