Studying wildfire effects on ecosystems is difficult because predicting *where* and *when* something will burn is nearly impossible, and rarely do you have robust pre-fire data. My dissertation samples from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park were collected prior to the Chimney Tops 2 from 2016. It was a wind-driven high intensity and high severity fire that burned 4,500 hectares. In this paper, we examine the pre and post fire pyrogenic carbon signal using an innovative BPCA method developed by Dr. Matosziuk.