Please all of you, excuse the "form letter" but I've been up on Palomar since early Friday morning helping deal with the big fire that started there Thursday. All of our cabins there survived (only one was seriously threatened and it was saved by fire-suppression aircraft drops). Two small free-standing decks were destroyed nearby, roughly 30 of our acres had the underbrush burned out but no significant damage to mature trees, and perhaps 8 acres on the steepest slope are now just ash and deer-antler-like stubs of totally burned manzanita and scrub oak shrubbery.

Tomorrow I'm to talk to the re-vegetation specialist at the National Forest office for advice and help on re-seeding that slope. The good news is all the poison oak there is gone, gone, gone! Again, no mature trees appear to have been hurt, and late Saturday afternoon I was allowed down in to check on a few favorite trees: "Miss Minerva", a cedar named in honor of my mother, and "Mr Big Tree", an immense (25-foot circumference) Douglas Fir, are both fine, for example, though a diseased oak had burned through at the base and toppled over onto Mr Big Tree, but he could take it. And late Monday a hose crew made their way there and put out the smoldering oak.

So what have I been doing for the past five days? Thursday night I heard about the fire on the 10:30 PM radio news on my way home. I reached Bonnie Phelps, the wife of the local sheriff, by e-mail about 11:00 who said the fire had come up our property but thought our cabin there was OK for the time being and our neighbor's (George Ravenscroft's) home had been saved even though the worst of the fire swept by it. I decided to wait for daylight to drive up. Friday morning I reached Ben Seiben, one of the two people who caretake one of our cabins and he said "bring up all the hose and sprinklers you can get, the fire has come around the other side of the point below Cedar Creek". A quick stop by Home Base (the clerk there was curious about where I was needing 6 sprinklers, 8 hoses, 9 "tees", and a dozen male and female hose fittings) and a 90-minute drive to the mountain to meet up with Ben and "JP" Bartkowski at the cabin above Cedar Creek.

We set the sprinklers up as a wall of water, strung 150 feet of drip hose over the roof, put as much gasoline in the well pump as it would hold, and watched the fixed-wing planes diving into the canyon just 200 yards away, dropping fire retardant powder, for almost 2 hours. I went to help a neighbor down the road, towards the southeast, the direction the fire was advancing, whose house was being threatened, after it was clear the planes had snuffed out the immediate danger at Cedar Creek. The neighbor, Bob Haase, has a big house and detached 3-car barn/garage in a clearing about 2 miles southeast of Cedar Creek, and the westerly winds were driving the fire over the two ridges in between. Two bus-loads of fire teams and a bulldozer had just been pulled back from trying to stop the fire at the first ridge and had regrouped to make a stand at the second, but losing ground. Bob asked for help clearing a line in front of the advancing grass fire (which was, loosely, preceding the burning tree-to-tree fire by 6 or 8 hours) and we all got our shovels and rakes and jumped to it, keeping the fire from his house until the professionals could get free and come over, at about 10:30 PM.

By 11:00 PM the others had gone back to guard their own places, but I stayed with Bob all night. Midnight we had sprinklers all around his deck and had thoroughly soaked the wood deck and house siding. We thought we were in good shape even as the fire broke through the line and the engines converged on his house. But.... about 1:30 they started a back fire along Bob's driveway - it was scary, just like in the movies, one guy is going along with a flaming tank of gasoline spraying the grass, another has unpacked a carton of railroad flares and is throwing them overhand into the brush. Bob's water lines had been carefully buried, except one 3/4-inch plastic (PVC) pipe coming up for a convenience hose bib - and it melted through quickly, making a gusher out by the driveway. Just as quickly, our sprinklers died and we thought -- uh, oh, (to put it politely). And we no longer could fill the fire trucks if necessary. We thought we could cap the pipe, and I was sent through the line back to a neighbor (George Ravenscroft again) who had pipe fittings, this at 3:00 am with fire blazing along his driveway, me in my little Oldsmobile with the surf racks, feeling the heat through the windows and just hanging in there.

I got the fittings and we capped the leak, but within minutes the main line down from the tanks melted through, hilariously, in that it made an Old Faithful geyser down over where the fire engines were parked, uselessly draining the tanks. We just stood guard over the house, me and Bob looking worried and the firefighters (most of whom, we learned, had come from Oklahoma) looking mostly bored - watchful, but bored, which I took to be a good sign! About 5:00 or 5:30 (Venus was visible whenever the smoke parted) one of them made his way up to the tanks to shut off the valve and preserve the water. Most of the crews left then for another structure, two trucks stood guard so we caught a couple hours sleep.

Morning came to find most of the nearby trees looking fine, which was astonishing to us after how it had looked at night. Mostly it was brush and dead trees that had burned, just like over at Cedar Creek, but the many burning oak stumps were a real danger, relighting themselves with every breeze, and we had no water at all once the fire trucks left at 9:00 or so. We urgently needed to repair the breaks. One neighbor brought over 8 lengths of 2-inch PVC pipe, another the necessary elbows and valves, a third the bottles of primer and glue. We studied the system diagram, paced off distances, found we had not nearly enough pipe (or manpower) to re-lay the 200+ feet of destroyed pipe, but worked out a "patch" to bypass the burned sections and shortcut-in water from the well pump to the tanks and the house.

This was quickly done, by perhaps 4:00 PM Saturday. We celebrated by washing hands, eating lunch, and flushing toilets. I then drove back west to Cedar Creek, where the chief let me go down and check on the springs and trees, and get my first look at the ash zone over on that other slope of our property. After that, I was on my way back to our other cabin up on Birch Hill (not in any immediate danger) to sleep, when a bunch of people I knew including Bonnie Phelps, the sheriff's wife, Robert Carlyle, and Bernadette Madison, flagged me down to come with them delivering meals to families who were guarding their homes. That was an adventure, we called it "Meals on 4 Wheels", and Mother's Kitchen deserves great credit for thoughtfulness and generosity in preparing and packing the dinners. We drove east, into the fire zone, and were surprised and disturbed that the fire had jumped over the main road, the East Grade, to the north side and was threatening to circle back around to the north and west, endangering not only Birch Hill but the Observatory to the north. I finally got to sleep about Midnight after we watched more backfires being set along the road to the east, toward Lake Henshaw.

Sunday the fire suddenly exploded out as it reached a dry area where the vegetation was thick and had not burned in many years - until then, I had been planning to drive back to San Diego soon. But it looked really nasty and if the winds had shifted to come from the east, a dry "Santa Ana", it could have reached Birch Hill in a few hours. So I stayed, shuttling back and forth between Birch Hill and Cedar Creek, chatting with the team watching Cedar Creek. By Sunday, they had 3000 feet of hose, three fire engines, a huge water tender, and 2 dozen men and women down in Cedar Creek felling burning dead trees and putting out hot spots. The chief there, who was directing helicopter water drops, said that Cedar Creek was their top priority (despite the heavy activity to the east) because they knew that if it flared up, it would rapidly burn uphill to Crestline and Birch Hill which is where most of the residents of Palomar Mountain live. So it made me feel good they realized its importance!

By Monday, Cedar Creek was at the mopping-up stage, including finally squirting the smoldering oak near Mr Big Tree that the helicopters had not been able to extinguish, and I mostly watched that all happen and then went back to our cabin and listened on the radio scanner to the crews struggling on the big fire to the east of us. They made much headway Monday night when it was cool, so today (Tuesday) I made a final check of Cedar Creek, unloaded the shovels and rakes from my car, and drove back to San Diego. Just putting the car in my garage made my whole house smell like smoke! I took it to the car wash and I think the car wash will smell like smoke in turn. The multitudinous seas ...

Needless to say, I took a lot of pictures over the 4 days, even having to bum film from neighbors to keep shooting, and after Bonnie Phelps sent e-mail out to her "MountainNews" mailing list that I was offering prints at-cost, I had orders for 12 extra sets. So I took the film in (8 rolls) for 15 prints each, this will be pushing 4000 prints! Oh my. I'm also having the negatives scanned, as is my custom these days, so you can watch for them next week on the web page I run, "http://www.palomarmountain.com" if you don't know. You can look tonight and see a few snapshots I was given yesterday night and just scanned in today, along with Bonnie Phelp's narrative of the 5 days. Also the sad news that the firefighter who was hurt Saturday died this afternoon, I'm so sorry to say. In any case, please take this email as explanation of why I haven't replied to any of your-all's emails the past almost-week, and I appreciate your understanding.
- Mike

PS - next weekend George Ravenscroft is having his annual Barbecue/Fiesta. We figure, if this weekend was the warm-up, think what the BBQ will be like!