Michael,

Easterners, with a few exceptions, don’t worry about wildfires too much. But Californians and, to a lesser extent, Coloradans,take wildfires as an inescapable part of life. Much like Kansans and tornadoes, probably. Since two of the “Beartoothers”, members of the Fogy Fivesome hiking crew, live in the San Diego area, and my sister & Dad live in Ventura County, I’ve been watching the news with trepidation as the fires spread towards their homes.

Phil, from Solana Beach, lives closest to the fires in that area, and what is more worrisome, downwind from the big one (see map).This weekend, Phil was planning to fly out here to Colorado and do some day-hikes with Chuck and me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the day before yesterday he laconically wrote that he and Laurie were one of 300,000 from their area who were forced to evacuate. So, he said, maybe he wouldn’t be flying out to Colorado after all. He mentioned that Laurie had told him to go anyway, but Phil wanted (of course!) to stay with her.

I searched for a good Google map of the situation and saw the big red area with a western finger pointing toward Cardiff-by-the-Sea (Solana Beach is the town just to the south, under the green icon). If you click on the triangle near Cardiff-by-the-Sea, a balloon pops up telling you to evacuate if you live in the area).

On one of the Google News items, the firefighters were decrying the hot 80-mph Santa Ana easterlies which were making the fires uncontrollable. A firefighter said, “Those fires are going to be blown right down to the ocean, and we can’t do a thing about it.”

Then I took another look at the map, and saw that there was a fire just east of Fallbrook, where another long-time Beartoother lives–Joe Ajello, the famed mountain biker of the fogy crew. He has a little farm there in Fallbrook with avocado trees. He brings a box of avocados out to Boulder every time he visits.
If you click on the triangle next to Fallbrook, the balloon tells residents they should flee towards the west through Camp Pendleton. (I haven’t seen any of this on the tube or the web, but I have grapes-of-wrath pictures in my mind of people driving out of town with vehicles crammed with all their treasures, their labs or poodles in boxes on the cartops. Can this really be happening?)

The twist in this part of the story is that Joe and his wife Barb are on vacation in Morocco. Or maybe they’re furiously flying home right now? They have a caretaker for their orchard, but he has probably fled town with all the rest of the town’s residents.

Now for a positive turn of events–

My sister lives in Simi Valley in Ventura county, which has several raging fires of its own. None of them are moving towards Simi Valley fortunately, but the valley is full of smoke so thick that a reporter said daytime was like night. Anyway, my sister, a pilot, monitors the wind like a hawk (literally), and told me that the Santa Ana was diminishing in strength.

A few hours later I got another email from Phil. He said that the evacuation was lifted in his town, and he and Laurie could return home. However, he noted that the return to normal wind patterns (no Santa Ana) would make the fires less predictable.He said that he would make up his mind on Thursday whether he’d fly out to Colorado this weekend or some time later.

We’re all keeping our fingers and toes crossed for our California friends.Will Phil and Laurie be able to keep their home? Will Joe and Barb reach their avocado farm, only to find smoking stumps and a burnt-out home? We’re hoping for the best. More stories as events unfold in the next days.

–rakkity