This is the 3rd anniversary of the outbreak of the Bighorn Fire in the Santa Catalina Mountains, Tucson, AZ. The fire started with a lightning strike at 9:46 p.m. June 5 in the foothills of the mountains. I remember seeing faint wisps of smoke while on a morning walk the following day. The fire started in a rugged area inaccessible by conventional firefighting methods. Apparently the authorities hoped/thought the fire would die out on its own. It didn't. It spread quickly, fueled by the tinder-dry buffel grass that is an invasive species in the Sonoran Desert. By early afternoon on June 6, teams of fire fighters were on the scene and tanker planes began dropping fire retardant in an effort to stop the fire's advance. I took the photo above from my patio. at 4:32 p.m. June 6. At this point the fire covered several hundred acres. It resisted all efforts by man and machine to put it out. The Bighorn Fire was eventually extinguished by monsoon rains on July 23 after burning nearly 120,000 acres. Fortunately, there was no loss of human life and relatively little damage to human-built structures. The habitat for animals was substantially changed, however.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." --Marcel Proust ………
In school, I was a visual learner....
The scale of the area is wonderfully captured by that tiny (huge) plane. Hope that this year the season is non eventful. My son mentioned the smoke from the prescribed burns near Flag.
Makes me wonder, if the lightning strike had happened 400 yrs ago, would the first nations have called in an air strike? Would there have been the density of human habitation that long ago that would have required intervention?
But then, I wonder about what might the landscape of Eastern Washington looked like before the Columbia River flood basalts engulfed about 163,700 km2 (63,200 sq mi) of the Pacific Northwest? -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Basalt_Group
lucky no loss of human life - sad that flora and fauna suffer so much
Has it regenerating now ?
Makes me wonder, if the lightning strike had happened 400 yrs ago, would the first nations have called in an air strike? Would there have been the density of human habitation that long ago that would have required intervention?
But then, I wonder about what might the landscape of Eastern Washington looked like before the Columbia River flood basalts engulfed about 163,700 km2 (63,200 sq mi) of the Pacific Northwest? -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River_Basalt_Group