The Fire in the Pines Festival is a free family Saturday in Wilmington’s longleaf pines, and in 2026 it runs October 10 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Halyburton Park. You get kids’ crafts and games, hayrides through the sandhills, fire trucks and a bulldozer parked where children can get up close to them, live music, food trucks, and a controlled burn in the pine woods to close the day. The one thing to sort out before you leave the house is parking, because there isn’t any at the park. Everybody parks at Lifepoint Church where South College Road meets 17th Street and rides a free trolley in.
Where to park, and the trolley that gets you in
The organizers state it flatly on the festival’s own site: “There will be no parking at Halyburton Park!” So if you drive down South 17th Street planning to pull into the park, you’ll be turning a car full of kids around and heading back the way you came. Park at Lifepoint Church instead, on the corner where South College Road meets 17th Street, and take the complimentary trolley the rest of the way. WCTI’s coverage of the 2024 festival put the church lot next to the Food Lion, which is the landmark to watch for if you don’t know that intersection.
The trolley’s schedule is the piece the festival leaves out. The site gives no first ride, no frequency, and no last return time, and it says nothing about accessible parking being held at the park itself. Give yourself more slack than you would for a park you can drive into, especially if someone in your group can’t stand around waiting for a shuttle. The festival’s email address is the only way to ask about any of that ahead of time.
What the day looks like between ten and three
Halyburton Park is a City of Wilmington park off South 17th Street, about 60 acres of sandhill and longleaf pine with most of it left undeveloped, so the festival is spread out under trees. The Coastal Land Trust, one of the partner organizations, describes the day as live raptors and other animals, hayrides, face painting and crafts, Smokey Bear, fire trucks, bulldozers, and over 40 interactive booths. The tables belong to conservation groups, fire crews, and state agencies, and they’re built around letting children handle things.
The fire equipment is the grown-up draw. Alongside the trucks, the organizers list a bulldozer and a marshmaster, a tracked vehicle built to drive across ground too wet for anything on wheels. The N.C. Forest Service is one of the festival partners, and its staff do the plain-language explaining on the organizer’s own equipment pages, down to the fire-resistant nomex clothing crews wear on a burn, which they call greens and yellows. For 2026 the organizers also list live music from Folkstone Stringband, food trucks, jugglers, and honey sampling, so there’s a reason to sit down partway through instead of walking the whole park in one go.
If you’re bringing small children, come at ten. The first hour is the calmest window for the crafts and the hayride, and it leaves the middle of the day for lunch from a food truck and a second lap through the booths. Show up at one and you’ll get a busier park and a shorter runway before things start closing down.
The controlled burn that closes the festival
The finale is a live prescribed burn in the park’s own pine forest. In 2024 it ran as a narrated demonstration, with a volunteer explaining what the crew was doing and taking questions from the crowd while it burned, and that’s the format to expect. The organizers don’t publish a start time for it, so treat three o’clock as the end of your day and stay through it.
Plan for the possibility that it doesn’t happen. Prescribed fire runs on wind direction, humidity, temperature, and how well smoke will lift, and it needs a permit, which is why the N.C. Forest Service treats every burn as a weather call made close to the day. The 2026 page also carries the line “(no rain date),” and weather has moved this festival before. WECT reported that the 2023 edition was pushed from October 12 to October 28 because of the forecast, so check the organizer’s site or their social channels the morning of before you load the car.
Why the longleaf pines need fire
Longleaf pine forests are built around fire, which is the reason this festival exists at all. Low-intensity fire keeps the canopy open, lets sunlight reach the forest floor, and knocks back the hardwoods that would otherwise crowd longleaf out. The Nature Conservancy, which runs the festival, puts it plainly on its controlled burns page: without it, the longleaf pines across the region would disappear, and so would the red-cockaded woodpeckers, Venus flytraps, and other rare plants that need fire to survive. If you’ve walked the flytrap trail at Carolina Beach State Park, you already know the flip side of this, because fire suppression is one of the named threats to the wild flytraps growing there.
The festival is older than its Wilmington run, and it used to go by a different name. According to its own history page, it started in March 2010 as Fire in the Lakes, held at the Boiling Spring Lakes Community Center by Angie Carl, then the Conservancy’s Coastal Plain Fire and Restoration Manager, and about 300 people came. It moved to Halyburton Park in 2014, took its current name, and shifted from spring to October to line up with Fire Prevention Week. Roughly 3,000 people turned up that first Wilmington year, more than all the earlier festivals put together.
What else to do with an October Saturday that ends at three
A festival that wraps at three leaves you most of an evening, and early October in Wilmington is a crowded stretch of calendar. Wilmington Riverfest takes over the downtown riverfront on October 3 and 4, the weekend before this one, so two free festival Saturdays land back to back if you’re planning a trip around either. For families still chasing the October fair experience, the closest one is now an hour southwest in Brunswick County, and our guide to finding a county fair near Wilmington covers what happened to the Cape Fear Fair and where to go instead.
A washed-out Saturday means finding something else for the kids to do, and October in Wilmington can go either way. If the forecast falls apart the night before, rainy-day things to do with kids near Wrightsville Beach is the list to have open on your phone.
FAQs
Can I bring the dog?
The festival doesn’t publish a pet policy, so check the City of Wilmington’s Halyburton Park page for the current park rule before you plan on it. Either way, this is a hard afternoon for a dog. There are fire trucks, hayrides, live raptors on display, a crowd moving in every direction, and woodsmoke at the end of it. If the dog is along for the weekend, this is the outing to leave it out of.
How much smoke is there, and is that a problem for someone with asthma?
A controlled burn puts a lot of smoke into the air, and where it goes depends on the wind that day. If you or a child has asthma or another lung condition, plan to watch from upwind or catch the trolley back before the demonstration starts. Expect your clothes to smell like woodsmoke on the drive home regardless.
Are the park’s trails open during the festival?
The organizers don’t publish anything about trail access on festival day, and the burn happens in the park’s pine forest, so don’t build your Saturday around walking the perimeter loop. The park is a better walk on an ordinary weekday anyway, with nothing else going on in it, so save the trail for a separate trip.
Is it worth going without kids?
Most of the programming is aimed at children, so an adult on their own will move through the booths much faster than a family does. The fire equipment and the burn demonstration aren’t kids’ attractions, though, and if those are what you came for, arriving in the early afternoon and skipping the middle of the day gets you the part you want. That’s the reverse of what works for a family, which is to show up at ten while everyone still has energy for the hayride.
The last hour is the one to stay for
For most of the day, Fire in the Pines is a free festival much like any other, with folding tables under the pines, a stringband, a line for the hayride, and children crowded around a fire truck. What makes it a different kind of Saturday is the end of it, when the crowd gathers at the edge of a pine stand and watches a crew put low fire on the ground on purpose. Confirm the date and hours on fireinthepines.org before you go, park at the church, and if the weather cooperates you’ll drive home with the smell of woodsmoke in your jacket.
