National Park Scouts

The Fire That Repainted Acadia

Host: Jenni·Topic: The 1947 Acadia fire, ecological succession, fall foliage

Intro

If you visit Acadia National Park in October, you will see something incredible. The whole park turns red and orange and yellow. Birch trees, maple trees, aspen trees, all of them blazing at once; like someone turned on the best lights in the whole forest. People come from all over the country just to see it. They call it peak foliage. They take about a million photos a day.

But here's what almost none of them know. Those trees, they shouldn't be there. Acadia wasn't supposed to look like this. Something happened. Something that changed this whole forest forever. And it happened in just one week. One single week in October 1947. Let's go.

Welcome to National Park Scouts, the show where curious kids discover America's wildest places. I'm Jenni. We have been spending time in Acadia National Park, that gorgeous park on the coast of Maine where the ocean meets the mountains, and you can watch the sunrise before anyone else in the country.

In our first three episodes, we followed a peregrine falcon, the fastest animal on Earth. We learned how ancient volcanoes and glaciers carved the granite mountains here, including Cadillac Mountain. And last time, we stood at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, watched the tides cover and uncover Bar Island, and we got a little wet at Thunder Hole.

Today, we're telling the story of fire; the one that changed Acadia forever.

The Driest Summer

To understand this story, you have to feel what October of 1947 felt like in Maine. It had been the driest summer anyone could remember. Barely any rain since spring. The leaves had all dried out, the soil was dry, even the bogs, which are usually wet and soggy places that almost never burn, were dry too. People who live there said the whole island felt like a pile of paper.

On Friday, October 17th, 1947, someone spotted smoke rising from a cranberry bog near the town of Hulls Cove, right outside Bar Harbor, Maine. No one knows exactly what started it. The official cause was never determined, but a small fire had begun.

For the first several days, firefighters thought they had it. It was growing slowly; they worked to contain it, and things looked okay.

And then, October 23rd, a cold front came roaring in off the ocean. The wind went from calm to 30 or 40 miles an hour, and a fire that firefighters thought they were winning exploded.

The Fire Explodes

The fire jumped roads. It jumped firebreaks, those cleared strips of land firefighters use to stop a fire from spreading. It jumped everything in its path. It burned through the heart of Acadia National Park. It jumped right out of the park and hit the town of Bar Harbor itself.

Sixty seven of the grand mansions along what people called Millionaire's Row burned to the ground. So did 170 homes and five hotels. The roads out of Bar Harbor were blocked by flames. People were trapped.

And that's when something pretty amazing happened. The fishermen showed up.

Fishermen from nearby towns looked across the water and saw the hills glowing orange in the dark, and they got in their boats. October nights off the coast of Maine are cold. The seas were rough, but they launched their boats anyway and ferried families out over and over until about 400 people had been brought safely across the water to shore. Regular people, neighbors, going out in the dark with fire on the hills behind them. That really happened.

Meanwhile, workers used bulldozers to cut a path, and 2,000 more people drove out that way to safety.

The fire burned for ten more days before rain and then snow finally came and put it out. It kept smoldering underground for another three weeks. It wasn't officially declared out until November 14th, almost a month after it started.

When it was finally over, 17,188 acres had burned on Mount Desert Island. More than 10,000 of those were inside Acadia National Park. Huge sections of the park were black. No trees, no birds. Just ash and bare rock.

People who had loved Acadia their whole lives didn't know if it would ever come back. But nature had a backup plan, and we'll find out what that plan looked like right after this.

Park Sound

Guess That Park Sound

Some kind of tiny construction worker? A miniature jackhammer? Knocking sounds, over and over. What do you hear? Take a guess.

That is a woodpecker.

Nature's Backup Plan

Here is something I love: woodpeckers were actually one of the first animals to move back into Acadia after the 1947 fire. Dead and burned trees are perfect for woodpeckers. The wood is softer and easier to drill into, and it's full of wood boring beetles and grubs, which woodpeckers love to eat. The fire basically created their dream neighborhood: free food, easy drilling, lots of real estate.

Which is actually the perfect introduction to the most surprising part of this whole story.

Before the fire, Acadia's forest was mostly dense, dark, evergreen trees. They kept their needles all year round. It was beautiful, but in the fall there wasn't much color; mostly just dark green.

The fire took most of those trees out. But here is what fire does: it clears the way for sunlight to reach the ground. And in a forest, sunlight changes everything.

Picture a playground packed with big kids. Those big kids have all the swings, all the climbing structures. There's no room at all for the little kids to get in. That's what the old spruce forest was like. The big trees had been there so long their canopy blocked all the light. Seeds from birch, maple, and aspen trees would blow in, but they could never get a foothold. Not enough sun.

The fire cleared out the playground, and the little kids finally got their turn on the swings.

Within just a few years, a completely different kind of forest was growing up from the ashes: birch trees with their white paper bark, maple trees, aspen trees with their round leaves; sun loving trees that never had a chance before. Now they were suddenly everywhere.

The animals followed. White tailed deer moved back in. Birds that love open mixed woodland arrived. Black bears found berry patches, which grow really well in areas that have recently burned.

The forest didn't just recover. It transformed. The fire didn't destroy Acadia; it rebuilt it into something completely different.

Ecological Succession

Scientists have a name for what happened: ecological succession. That's a long way of saying one community of plants and animals gets replaced by a new one after something big disturbs it. The disturbance was the fire. The birch and maple forest was what came next.

Now here's the thing about ecological succession: it keeps going. The paper birch and aspen that came in right after the fire are what scientists call pioneer species. They're tough, they love sunlight, and they move fast. But they're also short lived. As they grow and start shading out the forest floor, they actually create the shady conditions that spruce and fir need to grow.

So the spruce and fir, the trees that were there before the fire, are slowly, quietly coming back in underneath the birches. Give it another few hundred years, and parts of Acadia might look dark and dense again.

But right now, in this moment, all those red and orange and yellow trees you see every October, every single one of them is there because of the fire. Every yellow birch leaf, every red maple, every aspen shaking in the breeze; the fire made those. The forest is still telling that story 75 years later.

Wildcard Time!

Wildcard: True or False

The 1947 fire started in October, after the driest summer on record in Maine.

True. It had barely rained since spring. The whole island was bone dry.

The 1947 fire was so enormous it could be seen from space.

False. Not only was the fire not visible from space, humans hadn't even gone to space yet in 1947. Nice try though.

The birch and maple trees that give Acadia its famous fall colors are there because of the 1947 fire.

True. Those are exactly the pioneer species that moved in after the fire cleared the dark spruce forest. The most photographed thing in Acadia right now exists because of a wildfire.

Scout Question

Scout Question of the Day

Bobby, age 10 · Nevada

"I saw a burned forest once and it looked really sad. I was wondering, does it ever come back?"

Bobby, yes. But I'm not going to pretend it happens fast, because it doesn't. Trees take a long time. We're talking years before you'd even recognize the place as a forest again; decades before it looks full and tall. That part is real.

But here's what's also real: the ground comes back faster than you'd think. Little plants first, then shrubs, then saplings, those are tiny baby trees just starting. Birds show up, deer find the new berry patches. It's not the same forest; it's a different one. And it takes a long time to get there. But Bobby, it gets there. The forest you saw, it's already started. You just caught it at the very beginning.

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Alright, let's get back to the episode.

What did you learn today that most adults don't know?

I learned that Acadia's famous fall colors, the red maples and yellow birches that fill everyone's photos every October, only exist because of a wildfire in 1947. Those trees moved in after the fire cleared the dark spruce forest that was there before. The most beautiful thing about Acadia right now is a 75 year old comeback story.

Scout Mission

At home: find a photo of Acadia in fall foliage, those big bursts of yellow and red, and then find a photo of a dark green spruce forest. Look at them side by side and notice the differences. Which forest would you rather walk through? And tell me why.

If you're visiting: from the North Ridge Trail on Cadillac Mountain, look out at the forest below. Anywhere you see white barked birch trees, or the bright colors of maple mixed in with the dark green spruce and fir, that's the fire's work. You are literally looking at 1947.

Outro

A place where ancient volcanoes left their mark, where glaciers carved the mountains, where the ocean does impossible things twice a day, and where a week of fire in 1947 painted the forest in colors that people traveled thousands of miles to see.

This is our last episode in Acadia for now. But the next park is waiting, and it's going to bring us somewhere completely different. Scouts, your next adventure is waiting.