When Nicole Taylor and her family moved to their new home in the South Carolina mountains six months ago, the gorgeous view of Table Rock Mountain was the clincher.

She ended up with a porch-side seat to one of at least a half dozen wildfires in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas, fed by dry conditions and millions of trees that were knocked down by Hurricane Helene in 2024 and began decaying into tinderbox fuel.

Taylor watched this past weekend as smoke started to rise from the ridges across Highway 11 in Pickens County. The smoke got worse Monday, and it was pouring off the mountain Tuesday when she got a text saying she was under a mandatory evacuation.

So far no one has been hurt in the fires, which have burned more than 20 square miles in mostly rugged, remote forests and the popular state park that includes Table Rock Mountain. Only a few dozen structures have been damaged.

But the firefighting is slow work. Sources of water to extinguish the flames are scarce, so crews depend on building fire breaks to try to stop them in their tracks, using bulldozers, excavators and even shovels and saws to strip the land of fuel.

It then becomes a waiting game, making sure embers don’t jump the break and hoping for the winds to die down or — the best relief of all — a long, soaking rain.

Forestry officials were worried after all those trees came down during Hurricane Helene. It’s not just the fuel they create, they also hinder firefighters’ movement.

Extinguishing wildfires in the Carolinas takes time. A fire near Myrtle Beach that threatened dozens of homes and burned 2.5 square miles in early March has been out of the news for nearly four weeks, but it is still just 80% contained and sends smoke billowing over neighborhoods when the wind shifts.

Wildfires are unusual in the Carolinas, but not unheard of. The Great Fire of 1898 burned some 4,700 square miles in the two states, an area roughly the size of Connecticut, said David Easterling, the director of the Technical Support Unit at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Spring is typically when blazes happen, according to Kathie Dello, North Carolina’s state climatologist.

This season the Blue Ridge Mountains are dry, having received only about two-thirds of the normal amount of rainfall in the last six months since Hurricane Helene. March has been full of sunny, dry, windy days.

Meanwhile the risk to people and property has increased over the years thanks to a boom in popularity of the mountains as a place to live.

Any trees downed by Helene that do not burn this year will still be around for future fire seasons.

The two large fires in South Carolina continued to burn Thursday. The Table Rock fire has consumed 7.1 square miles, and the one on Persimmon Ridge in Greenville County has burned 2.4 square miles.

The fires are about 8 miles apart, and emergency officials have asked almost everyone living between them to leave as a precaution. The evacuation zone extended into nearby Transylvania County, North Carolina.