As previously illustrated, late Sunday night an electrically interesting cloud floated by leaving a few wildfires in its wake. I stayed up excessively late photographing it and processing photos; by 4:30 AM or so I’d had about enough and went to bed. Before that I checked the progress of the fires and it seemed like the firefighters seemed like they might have had a handle on it. It looked like nothing of much more interest was going to happen.
I wonder how that prediction panned out…
By 9:30 the following morning, the hill looked like this:
A little later and a lot closer, it looked like this:
And by the afternoon, it looked like this:
Turns out, right around sunup the winds picked up and the whole hillside, several miles of it, burst into a big sheet of fire. And of course I missed that.
I did, however, catch this dust devil:
And I caught a *lot* of photos of the massive aerial response to the fire. I’ve never seen a wildfire out here that had so many aircraft responding to it, everything from cropdusters and Jet Rangers on up the firebombing DC-10’s.
The fire now *seems*to be under control possibly even out. It’s going to be a bad fire season out here du to the wt spring. Plants grew like mad, and now it’s nearly 100 degrees and rain is a distant memory.