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Sometimes it never pays to want to sleep in your own bed. No sooner had I gotten home to San Jose then I got the tweet form CAL Fire about the Crown fire in Southern California. I was only an hour away from that fire Thursday.
The fire is contained at 62% as I write this and is 13,918 acres in size. It was a large fire but LA County Fire got a handle on it fairly quickly and when I left the area last night it had mostly laid down and there were no large flames mostly just spot fires.
I just barely had enough time to relax and make dinner after returning from Lassen county when I get the CAL Fire twitter. Kern County Fire was battling a blaze south of Tehachapi and it looked like it was a big one.
The initial report was 400 acres and 30 plus structures lost with 150 structures threatened. 
I would have time for a quick nap then load up the car and head south. The drive would only take four hours.
I wanted to hit the road at 1 a.m. but I over-slept my alarm and didn’t get up till 5 a.m. (I guess I was more tired from the drive back from Lassen than I realized). I made quick time down I-5 and made it to Incident Command in Tehachapi around 10:30 a.m.
Yesterday I drove up north past Redding into Lassen National Forest for my first fire of the season. We had a wet winter so the season is getting off to a slow start. The Russell Fire was the first major incident up north.
The fire was in a remote part of the national forest making it not a very newsworthy event outside of the Redding area but it provided me the opportunity to get out and shoot.
There are a few pics in the archive here.
Other states have hunting seasons or tourist seasons. We have those in California as well but we also have fire season. As the dry summer winds heat up the California landscape the moisture is driven from the ground vegitation first and eventually from the trees creating a very dangerous set of conditions. 
If you have ever spent a summer here you quickly get used to reading and hearing about the wildfires that spring up around the state.
Two years ago I got the chance to cover my first set of wildfires that occurred very close to San Jose. The first fire was the Summit fire that started when a land owner illegally burned some debris up on Summit Road along the border of Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties. (more…)
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