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On April 22, 2021, 19 acres burned on a sloping face south of Double Knob, a modest peak nestled just south of the Buncombe-Henderson County line. A day later, mountainside still aflame, Scott Ashcraft arrived to document the damage from what would become known as the Seniard Creek Fire.
Ashcraft had been a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist in the Pisgah National Forest for nearly three decades. Assignments like this were routine. But Seniard would prove unusually consequential for Ashcraft: In the five years since the fire, it has become both a site of great scientific promise and a symbol of what Ashcraft describes as a culture of mismanagement, destruction and retaliation…