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| Sunday, July 1, 2007 |
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Fire in Paradise 
| | Last night (still tonight as I write this, at 12:30am), we were out at a ranch west of Santa Barbara when we looked east and spotted smoke rising from behind the Santa Ynez mountains. There was nothing on any of the local news media (to which we had access at the time). And, to my knowledge, nobody has blogged about it yet either. (Correction: The Independent has this story.) One of the party-goers found out from a public safety contact that the fire was along Paradise Road, in Paradise Valley, which lies behind the spine of the Santa Ynez mountains. The mountains run about 4 miles from the coast, and Paradise Valley lies about six miles inland. |
| | InciWeb lists it as the Rancho Wildland Fire. As of 2.5 hours ago, it was holding at 300 acres. "Since sunset, the spread has substantially slowed." Winds were very high from our vantage, and they were clearlly blowing smoke seaward, but the smoke diminished after looking scary early on. The time of origin is listed as 1736 (5:36 PM), although it first appears in my photos at 1729. |
| | Any news organization, or blogger, or anybody, is free to use the photos linked to from the shot above. |
| | Meanwhile, growth potential is "high", terrain difficulty is "extreme", and "potential problems exist on the east flank". |
| | Fire hazard here in southern California is at a record high. Earlier fires started in Paradise Valley or on this side of the ridge have burned enormous areas. |
| | By the way, on this day seventeen years ago, the Painted Cave Fire spread from a spot near the center of the photo above, eventually burning 5000 acres, 440 houses, 28 apartment complexes and 30 other structures. Painted Cave itself is a community on the ridge of the mountain behind which the smoke can be seen rising. |
Magical mountains
| | But the most impressive views were of familiar mountains — the San Bernardinos and the San Gabriels, which together frame the Los Angeles basin. |
| | At the late hour of the day when we encountered them, the approach to LAX was straight west, while the sun set somewhat north of that, so I was looking almost directly into the sun over the wing when I spotted the San Gabriel Mountains laced with this amazing haze. I'm not sure if it was smog or something made by nature rather than civilization. I suspect the latter. The color was too light. This wasn't brown L.A. haze, or the orange layers that come from fires, but something else. (Although you get a little L.A. smog close to the ground in this shot.) |
| | So I shot it. That's the series you'll find if you click on the link behind the picture above. Or here. |
| | By the way, this was supposed to be a Saturday post, but it went up too late. |
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