Fire On The Mountain

The devil's gone down to Georgia California and the fire's on the mountain (with apologies to Charlie Daniels).

Sunday we took a little drive up Caliente Creek Road mainly because my husband was getting a touch of cabin fever. We stopped along the way at this little cafe/convenience store for a snack and we saw smoke starting to billow over the mountain tops. It was still quite a ways away though, so we were in no danger. This is the Piute Fire.

And in the parking lot were all these fire trucks, so we knew we really were safe!

As we drove further along we got a bit closer and the fire seemed to be getting bigger.

We stopped at this portion of the road. This was about as close as we could (or wanted to) get. Just prior to taking this picture we saw flames at the top of the ridge. We waited a while but it didn't happen again.

If you look really closely you can see an airplane, probably some sort of fire fighting plane, near the top of the bottom third on the right hand side of the smoke column. (Did that make sense???)
Here is that same shot blown up. Now you should be able to see the plane. De plane! De plane!

On our way out of the valley we passed these fire helicopter guys in a big field. There were actually about four helicopters on the ground at the time.

This was at the far end of the valley, as we were leaving.

Hopefully this and all the other fires will be under containment very soon. It's always struck me how odd it is that on one side of the country we are in drought conditions and fires are burning out of control while the other side of the country is half under water.

I hope where ever you are everything is as it should be.