Jefferson Lake, Elk Lakes & Jefferson Ridge — Saturday, Aug. 1, 2020

The Elk Lakes trail might open again as well as the Jefferson Ridge trail and the Jefferson Lakes trail that also got wiped out in the 2018 maple fire. The fire started when tree thieves wanted to chop down a Big-Leaf maple tree. Tree thieves are basically people that go out on a hiking trail or road and look for a big tree to chop down for lumber. This Big-Leaf maple was worth about 6,000 dollars in lumber. But these tree thieves ran into a big problem. There was a colony of bees that made its home in the tree. So the tree thieves thought of covering it with wasp spray but that did little to stop the swarming bees. So they had another idea. They were going to cover the beehive with gasoline and light it on fire. They'd planned to put out the fire with water bottles. So they lit the gas covered beehive on fire and it went out of control. The fire burned thousands of acres and it took two days to control. The fire was 4.5 billion dollars to extinguish. It took billions of dollars to extinguish it. Not a few water bottles for a few bucks. They tracked down the people who started the fire days later. They are still in jail today. It's very sad what these tree thieves had done to all the wildlife. So many animals died in the flames of the 2018 maple fire.