Wildfires!
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I should have known it would be a weird sky day. Coming home after an early morning hike in Death Valley there was a cloud hanging over Corkscrew Peak that struck me as so unusual I stopped and snapped a pic. It made Corkscrew look like a volcano belching great plumes of white smoke. What a harbinger! As the pic shows, the rest of the sky was utterly cloudless.
Late that afternoon I went outside for something and noticed smoke rising from behind the "Beatty B" hills, which are west of town and, oh, about three blocks from my house. Sheeeee-it, I thought, that's awfully close. A few minutes later I looked out the front window, and OMG! now there was smoke rising from behind the mountains east of town! It was miles away and on the other side of several mountains, but still. Any wildfire is always remarkable. Two at once is downright eerie.
Naturally, I had to go out and drive around. First, I drove over to check on the ghost town, RHYOLITE, which is situated more or less on the other side of the Beatty B mountain, but before I even got there it became clear the fire was much further away than it had appeared -- behind other mountains, the ones that surround Rhyolite, so Rhyolite was fine. And sizing up where the fire seemed to be in relation to our house I felt, while not exactly reassured, less imminently threatened.
I then drove up North 95 to check out the fire east of town, but it was way back from the road behind still more mountains. If there are roads leading back there I don't know them yet, and it was late and starting to get dark, and I didn't have Ryan or the 4-Runner, so I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to go exploring. Besides, it might even have been on Nevada Test Site land and completely off limits. So, I just went back home to sit and watch and wait.
It's not often that I'm aware of any drawbacks to living in a tiny and remote community like Beatty, but if no local radio station, TV station, newspaper, or even web site could be deemed drawbacks, I was keenly aware of them that afternoon. I had no source of info about what was going on At. All. I could only watch and guess. I found myself sort of wandering back and forth from the front porch (facing east) to the back porch (facing west) snapping pics and wishing Ryan were there to see it all.
After a couple of hours the wind picked up considerably, blowing straight from the west. The Beatty B fire, which had died down, also picked up, and before I knew it smoke was pouring down the mountain and starting to envelop the town. The air had taken on a brownish yellow color, and it smelled like smoke inside the house. The "Beatty B" became all but invisible. I hunkered down and started trying to think about what I might throw in the car to take with me, if I needed to flee. And all this time I could not believe Ryan wasn't there. I couldn't even reach him by phone. Here's the most interesting thing that's happened in Beatty since we moved here, and he's missing it!
Fortunately, after a couple more hours the winds died down in Beatty and so, apparently, did the Beatty B fire to the west. Before long the air had cleared up enough to sit on the front porch and watch the drama unfold to the east. That fire was farther away, but as night dropped over the landscape it became apparent that it was by far the worst of the two. Where during the day I'd only seen dark smoke I could now see bright red, as fires blazed over ridges and through canyons looking exactly like glowing lava creeping down the side of a volcano. There's that volcano theme again for the second time in the same day.
Eventually, I went to bed but sleep was fitful. I awoke and looked out at around 4am, and the fires were still glowing off to the east. Sunrise an hour later revealed plenty of black smoke still billowing up from behind the mountains (visible in the last pic).
As the day wore on there was less and less smoke visible in the east, so those fires either burned out or just burned out of sight behind more mountains. In the afternoon I went down to the store and got the skinny, which was that no humans had been injured, and no structures had been burned or even threatened, "only land." Consensus seemed to be that Nature was just taking care of necessary maintenance, getting rid of old brush. Late afternoon brought rare huge rainstorms to the whole area, so that, dear reader, was that. No more fires, and all's well that ends well.
Now the only mystery that remains is that weird Corkscrew "cloud." Hmmmmmmmmm...
: - )
---
All photographs on this blog are my own, taken by me, copyright owned by me.
I should have known it would be a weird sky day. Coming home after an early morning hike in Death Valley there was a cloud hanging over Corkscrew Peak that struck me as so unusual I stopped and snapped a pic. It made Corkscrew look like a volcano belching great plumes of white smoke. What a harbinger! As the pic shows, the rest of the sky was utterly cloudless.Late that afternoon I went outside for something and noticed smoke rising from behind the "Beatty B" hills, which are west of town and, oh, about three blocks from my house. Sheeeee-it, I thought, that's awfully close. A few minutes later I looked out the front window, and OMG! now there was smoke rising from behind the mountains east of town! It was miles away and on the other side of several mountains, but still. Any wildfire is always remarkable. Two at once is downright eerie.
Naturally, I had to go out and drive around. First, I drove over to check on the ghost town, RHYOLITE, which is situated more or less on the other side of the Beatty B mountain, but before I even got there it became clear the fire was much further away than it had appeared -- behind other mountains, the ones that surround Rhyolite, so Rhyolite was fine. And sizing up where the fire seemed to be in relation to our house I felt, while not exactly reassured, less imminently threatened.
I then drove up North 95 to check out the fire east of town, but it was way back from the road behind still more mountains. If there are roads leading back there I don't know them yet, and it was late and starting to get dark, and I didn't have Ryan or the 4-Runner, so I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to go exploring. Besides, it might even have been on Nevada Test Site land and completely off limits. So, I just went back home to sit and watch and wait.
It's not often that I'm aware of any drawbacks to living in a tiny and remote community like Beatty, but if no local radio station, TV station, newspaper, or even web site could be deemed drawbacks, I was keenly aware of them that afternoon. I had no source of info about what was going on At. All. I could only watch and guess. I found myself sort of wandering back and forth from the front porch (facing east) to the back porch (facing west) snapping pics and wishing Ryan were there to see it all.
After a couple of hours the wind picked up considerably, blowing straight from the west. The Beatty B fire, which had died down, also picked up, and before I knew it smoke was pouring down the mountain and starting to envelop the town. The air had taken on a brownish yellow color, and it smelled like smoke inside the house. The "Beatty B" became all but invisible. I hunkered down and started trying to think about what I might throw in the car to take with me, if I needed to flee. And all this time I could not believe Ryan wasn't there. I couldn't even reach him by phone. Here's the most interesting thing that's happened in Beatty since we moved here, and he's missing it!
Fortunately, after a couple more hours the winds died down in Beatty and so, apparently, did the Beatty B fire to the west. Before long the air had cleared up enough to sit on the front porch and watch the drama unfold to the east. That fire was farther away, but as night dropped over the landscape it became apparent that it was by far the worst of the two. Where during the day I'd only seen dark smoke I could now see bright red, as fires blazed over ridges and through canyons looking exactly like glowing lava creeping down the side of a volcano. There's that volcano theme again for the second time in the same day.
Eventually, I went to bed but sleep was fitful. I awoke and looked out at around 4am, and the fires were still glowing off to the east. Sunrise an hour later revealed plenty of black smoke still billowing up from behind the mountains (visible in the last pic).
As the day wore on there was less and less smoke visible in the east, so those fires either burned out or just burned out of sight behind more mountains. In the afternoon I went down to the store and got the skinny, which was that no humans had been injured, and no structures had been burned or even threatened, "only land." Consensus seemed to be that Nature was just taking care of necessary maintenance, getting rid of old brush. Late afternoon brought rare huge rainstorms to the whole area, so that, dear reader, was that. No more fires, and all's well that ends well.
Now the only mystery that remains is that weird Corkscrew "cloud." Hmmmmmmmmm...
: - )
---
All photographs on this blog are my own, taken by me, copyright owned by me.
posted by K Hubert at 2:32 PM
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