Grand View Summer: Fire!

The Bear Wallow Fire was started on Sunday, May 29, 2011. I heard about it on the same day. It was just an offhand comment about a fire near Hannigan Meadow caused by some careless people who didn't take care of their campfire. I didn't even think about the fire throughout the rest of Sunday or Monday morning. On Monday afternoon I smelled smoke, but I figured that the wind had just blown it over. For some reason I never even thought of the fact that if the wind was blowing the smoke, it was blowing the fire, too.
Around 2 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, the smoke was visible high above us. It eventually reached out and covered the sun, making everything look kinda orange. It was *very* cool. At that point, anyhow.

As the wind blew, I was aware of the smell of the smoke, but it sort of blew away so that it wasn't covering the sun anymore. I called my mom and asked her to pray that the fire wouldn't come to camp. I felt like I was being overly dramatic, but supposed it couldn't hurt.

On Wednesday morning everything looked pretty clear, but the smell of the smoke was present from the time I woke up. After lunch, the smoke from the fire began to reach up again, eventually covering the sun again. This time it didn't blow off, though. Instead, the covering over the sun got thicker and everything got darker. Right before dinner when I stepped outside it sounded like a light rain, but there was no rain. It was ash falling from the sky.

(You can see some blue sky on the bottom left. We had at least SOME blue sky all day Wednesday, but none on Thursday)

(That pink dot in the center? That's all I saw of the sun from Wednesday 'til Thursday night.)

Everything looked foggy on Thursday morning. It wasn't red and yellow like Wednesday, just gray and bleak.

I actually wasn't worried at all. I remembered smoke settling into the valley in the morning where I lived during the wildfires in Colorado several years back. And those fires weren't really a threat. So I just figured that as the day went on the smoke would lift and everything would be fine. Buuuut... it didn't lift.  Shortly after lunch we got the word, "We're going to evacuate". The forest service/fire officials told us that *if* we needed to evacuate, it wouldn't be until Friday, but we were going to leave anyhow.

(All of the flecks in the above picture are flakes of ash.)

As we packed, I pretty much lost track of time. Soon it was pitch black outside. I felt like it couldn't be that late, but as crazy as the day had been, I really had no clue what time it was. So as we drove down the road away from camp, I was surprised to see how it got continually lighter and lighter out until we were in broad daylight!

(Looking back on the smoke we had just come out of.)

Sitting at Sonic for awhile breathing in the fresh air and seeing the smoke from Alpine was when I was finally struck by the gravity of the situation. And I realized that my summer was probably going to be somewhat different than I had imagined.

In case you're interested:

Here is the video Uncle Brian made of the fire:


Wallow Fire Timeline
Here are some pretty incredible pictures of the fire.