A Conversation With the Smokies’ Fire Manager

As the National Park Service’s acting Appalachian Piedmont Coastal Zone fire management officer, Shane Paxton handles fire-related issues for 22 national parks in four different states. He’s headquartered in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and originally from a firefighting family in Franklin, North Carolina. The nation’s most-visited national park commands much of his professional attention. 

What led you to a career in fire management?

I went to college in Colorado. I came home not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, was working landscaping up in Highlands (North Carolina), which is my typical summer job, and my mom saw an ad in the paper for the seasonal law enforcement academy at Southwestern (Community College). She was like, ‘Oh, you should do this. It sounds like something you would do.’ I had no idea that park rangers carry guns. I had no idea what it was. I thought it was, ‘we’ll just learn how to build campfires and learn how to rappel,’ that kind of stuff. I show up day one and get the syllabus and literally, this is full-bore law enforcement. The last week was basic wildland firefighter training, and that was the light bulb moment. That’s what I want to do. Immediately after I walked out of that class, I drove across the county to the N.C. Forest Service office that was there and got a job. And that was in 1997.

What does your job entail?

Everything I do really can be related to wildfire. A lot of our prescribed burns, that relates to wildfire. The supervision of folks, keeping them current, qualified and legal, so to speak, to fight fire, it all goes to that. But in terms of on-the-ground, day-to-day, I’m probably around 50 percent supervision, and 50 percent would be planning for the next fire, planning for the next prescribed fire. We rely on partnerships, so it’s a lot of building relationships.

What is most challenging about fire management in the Smokies? 

Everyone talks about staffing, and that’s part of it, but there’s also a real need for education. The Park Service has become really specialized in a lot of ways, and some of that has not been for the good. It wasn’t too long ago where if there was fire reported, you had half the park responding, so to speak. These days we struggle with getting enough responders for our incidents.

How have the 2016 wildfires changed things in your profession?

Half of my career was out west, so we were exposed to a lot of those kinds of fires every year. Here it was always, well, we just don’t get those kinds of fires. It won’t happen here. And it did. And I think people are still trying to come to terms with that. It’s changed some of my views. We have a fire policy where if we get a natural start in a certain area, we can let it burn. We can manage that fire and come up with some boundaries, maybe on a bigger scale, but let the fire do its natural thing on the landscape. Since 2016, we’ve been real reluctant to do that. There’s just a lot of perception that fire is bad and we need to put it out. Certainly with a natural start I lean that way as well. I don’t think we, as a park, are ready to accept the responsibility of letting a fire like that burn on its own like we used to, and I’m positive the community is not ready for that. That’s a pretty big change.

How is the equation different with prescribed fire? 

We’ve tried for so many years to eliminate fire. Now most people understand you have to have it, because if we don’t have prescribed fire, if we don’t do it on our terms, it’s still going to happen. And it’s not going to be on our terms. It’s going to be on the hottest, driest, windiest day when it’s going to do the most damage. And that’s what we saw in 2016.