It Was Real

Thursday morning I hitched up the trailer and headed up to Lake Tahoe for some camping, returning home yesterday.  It was a magnificent respite.

It usually takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours to drive there from home, but there was work going on that required many stretches of Highway 50 to be reduced to one-way, so it took 3 1/2 to 4 hours to get there.  What was this work, you might ask?  Tree removal.  Burned tree removal.

One of those horrific fires we all heard about this past summer burned through a lot of the El Dorado National Forest and made its way to the Tahoe Valley, some of the most beautiful (and expensive) real estate in the country.  There were very real fears that the fire, once cresting Echo Summit, would burn its way down the mountains and right up to the lake itself.  Fortunately, it didn't get down into the valley, but the Lake Tahoe area was evacuated.

I had to drive through a lot of burned area to get to Tahoe.  We were stopped a lot so that one-way traffic could get past a work area, and the damage was visible and bad.  Here would be a wall of burned, cut, and stacked trees, and there would be the remains of someone's cabin--the stone chimney remained standing, with warped corrugated aluminum from the roof covering ashes.  Here you'd see a scorched propane tank for a cabin, and there--there would be a complete cabin, seemingly untouched by the fire that charred all that was around it.  Much like a tornado, the damage was devastating, but once in awhile you'd see a completely freestanding cabin amidst all the other ruins, completely unharmed by the inferno that obviously raged all around it.  

Will we ever allow small fires to burn, or clear underbrush, so that these huge fires don't do so much damage?  Hard to say.