The news wasn’t good when I got up this morning. The sky was a sickly orange to yellow color and we were getting ashfall from the Creek Fire burning on the other side of Shaver Lake. The air quality sensor on our weather station was pegged out at 999 ug/m^3. I gathered up everything from the house and loaded my parents pickup truck. This included getting the pet carriers for both Poofy and Sunny into the back seat. I put my truck and my car into the garage as neither of those vehicles were big enough to take everything and all the fur people back to Monterey. Then I got to work securing everything outside in case the fire came this way. Meanwhile Poofy and Sunny didn’t seem concerned at all.
At some point the previous day the power had gone out and the backup generator kicked on. The transmission lines were damaged or destroyed that brought the power up out of the Big Creek area for Southern California Edison partially as a result of that, we lost power here as well. Luckily the generator can run everything and the DSL continued to function.
I was talking with my uncle on the radio throughout the day as he closed up his cabin and loaded everything up to prepare to evacuate as well. Not once did I ever receive a phone call or hear a siren or get a knock on the door saying we needed to get ready to evacuate. My uncle’s cabin is far enough off the grid that even if the sheriff knew about him, they probably wouldn’t go down there to tell him. So instead I periodically checked the internet to see if we needed to evacuate. The Fresno County website was basically unusable so I ended up relying on a combination of Facebook and Twitter to figure out what was going on.
Finally the evacuation order for our area all the way back up to Courtright came so I told my uncle it was time to go. He came over to Forked Meadow while I loaded up the cats, locked everything up, and make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Then we left Forked Meadow for what felt like could be the last time. Huge pieces of hot ash were falling out of the sky and visibility was very limited.
We got out onto Dinkey Creek Road and headed toward Shaver Lake along with a few other cars and trucks. The first official-looking people we saw was when we came into Shaver Lake where crews were working on the east side of town. Southern California Edison had already brought in huge diesel generators to the rest stop by their yard and CAL FIRE’s facility to get power up again at some point but with flames shooting up out of Musick Mountain and Mount Stevenson just west of Shaver Lake it felt a bit premature.
We managed to turn left onto Highway 168 amid a stream of fire vehicles and heavy equipment coming up the mountain and a trickle of cars coming from the Huntington Lake direction. Driving along Six Mile toward Cressman’s we saw some fire below the road and several bulldozers cutting lines to try and keep it from jumping.
As we passed Shaver Ranch, we saw them waiting to pull out onto Highway 168 with a big loaded stock trailer and a collection of other vehicles. Shaver Ranch would burn to the ground. We passed Cressman’s what turned out to be a couple hours before a massive wall of fire shot over Pine Ridge and obliterates the entire area. There was more traffic heading up the hill than down the hill as we got to the stop sign at the bottom of the four lane.
In Prather they had traffic control at the roundabout to turn away people who weren’t there to fight the fire from going toward the direction of the fire. Everything to Prather was being evacuated at this point because they thought the fire could blow into the low country. The massive black plume illuminated with orange flame underneath was wild to see behind us.
We stopped in Millerton for fuel and to make sure all of the stuff in our trucks hadn’t shifted or had any issues. Sunny and Poofy were not exactly pleased to be passengers. I had to manhandle them into their carriers back at Forked Meadow.
After several hours of driving, I got back to Monterey where I unloaded the cats into the house, setup a second litter box for Poofy, and unloaded everything else from the truck. My N95 mask that I had used while working outside to prepare the house for the Creek Fire was brown from all the smoke and dust. But we were all safely out of the danger path. And then we got to start waiting and watching the details trickling out from the incident command about what the fire was doing and when we might be allowed back in.
When we left, I kept the generator running. It’s on a 500 gallon propane tank so as long as the propane lasts and the generator doesn’t have a fault, the house will have power. That means that as long as Ponderosa Telephone’s network infrastructure keeps functioning so the DSL connection stays up, I’ll be able to see what’s going on at Forked Meadow from the various sensors and cameras I’ve distributed around the place.
