The morning started clear and sunny but last night the Creek Fire started down below Camp Sierra in the Big Creek drainage.
The first real indication I had that the fire was going to be big was when an absolutely massive pyrocumulus cloud blew up to the north of Forked Meadow. It was wild how huge this thing was. Way bigger than most thunderheads we see here and it looked different as well.
I contacted my uncle over the radio who was down at his off the grid cabin to let him know the situation and that it didn’t look very good. The fire expanded extremely rapidly throughout the day and they were already evacuating Shaver Lake, Huntington Lake, and everything back to Edison Lake by the evening.
The map in the evening of the fire perimeter shows how massive this thing got in just one day. It had already burned over Mammoth Pool by this point. There’s an excellent podcast about the 242 people who were trapped by the firestorm at Mammoth Pool that’s worth a listen.
And this point I was talking with my parents who were out of town (hence why I was house sitting for them) about what I should pull together in case I had to evacuate with the cats.