'Tis That Season

I'm off to Sacramento to sit around in staging and wait for the huge amounts of lightning expected in the Sierras between now and Monday. I'll try to check in a few times just to keep Max and Ref straight.

You folks have fun the next 2-3 weeks.

 

I'm sitting here in Sacto waiting for an assignment. Sounds like we'll either head back north to the Klamath NF where they got a bunch of lightning last night or south to the Sequoia NF where they have a fire that's causing some problems. Or maybe we'll end up working on the Big Sur fires along Hwy 1 or somthing completely new. At any rate, the Sierra lightning expected for yesterday didn't quite materialize, but we're anticipating another round this afternoon. We have a meeting in 45 minutes where we might find something out... it'll either be another night of TV and reading or 40 rigs racing across CA to set up camp before dark.

Coming down from OR, I hit a wall of smoke just south of Mt. Shasta that lasted to Sacto. Folks say it's smoked in all the way down to the Mojave Desert. It's has everyone a little freaked out because CA is not supposed to really start burning until Fall. That it's going this hard this early and is expected to last throughout the season will cause resource fatigue and availability issues when we start getting big fires in ID, MT, WA, and OR in late July.

So, DD, it looked like it might be relatively quiet when we were forecasting in April, but now it looks like we'll have big fires in CA and the above states until the snow flies.

And yes Rox, I will have fun... in the sick, twisted way that you have to have fun to make it through some of the tougher times. The best part is after a successful assignment when you're looking around at everybody and you know you're all thinking, "How the hell did that turn out so well?"