You can smell it before you see it. The animals and creatures sense it way before we do. Everybody will be naturally finding a safe place to be until the fire passes.
When I was growing up in Steinbeck’s pastures of heaven south of Salinas, smoke would rise each year from the Santa Lucia Mountain range above the Big Sur coast.
From the ranch, I could see the white tower of Sid Ormsbee fire lookout perched above Carmel Valley on Rancho San Carlos. I would often see several columns of smoke coming up at once. Nobody thought much of it. It was that time of year, it was normal then.
Fire in the wilderness is natural and an essential part of a functioning fire adapted ecosystem. Fire historically visits the landscape through lightning and people ignitions. This has been occurring since the beginning of time.
Back in the day, Los Padres Forest Service personnel, namely the Lopez brothers, would take a box of wooden matches with them each fall as they rode the forest trails for the last time out of the wilderness, setting fires in rats nests at the bottom of the slopes, continuing the historical fire cycle. The fires would burn until rains came.
Grandpa Fred Nason, born of an Esselen Tribe family, told me that he did the same thing in the headwaters of the Carmel River until the Forest Service Ranger told him, without a sense of humor, if he did it one more time he would be arrested and go to jail.
Where the Santa Lucia mountain range starts its climb from the beaches of Monterey Bay rests Fort Ord. Huge booms from the big artillery pieces, and occasionally the rocking blast of 1000 pound naval rounds still there from World War II, when it was an inland target for battleships, detonated by brush fires burning as a result of army training maneuvers, were normal when I was a kid.
Indians had populated the wilderness for thousands of years and tended the landscape with regular burning. Fire is part of indigenous economy with people living intimately in the environment with fire part of their habitat.
Many fires all the time meant that the landscape was nourished and reborn with each burn, and the vegetation was not super heavy and overgrown, as it had become by the middle of the 20th century.
Then a heavy snowstorm came, bringing heavy snow followed by rain weighing more heavily on the mature vegetation that was 50 to 100 years old due to the suppression of fires. The snow laden branches broke throughout the forest and was now sitting there curing and drying.
A summertime lightning storm passed through the state igniting 1700 fires overnight in early August 1977, some of the strikes right smack dab in the wilderness. Most of them went out by themselves.
In the meantime, firefighters scurried to extinguish as many fires as they could as fast as they could. Nevertheless, many fires evaded initial attack efforts.
Fire Helicopter 100 had been dispatched from Howard Forest in Mendocino county to fires occurring in the Mount Diablo range, and further south on the Rancho San Carlos in Monterey County. Having extinguished several of the lightning ignited fires, the aircraft commander observed the curling white smokes coming up in the forest. Helicopter 100 circled both of those smokes overhead, radioing in that they could land and easily extinguish those fires. They were informed, negative, those fires are not priorities at this time, you are not authorized to suppress. The Marble and Cone fires, as they were first named, eventually merged together.
I was then a fire captain stationed in Mendocino county when the phone rang at 3 AM, the dispatcher informing me that I was assigned to a large fire complex in Lassen and Modoc counties. 10 fires over 1,000 acres apiece, and they didn’t know how many more. That’s a story for another day.
A week and a half later, I was boarding a Chinook helicopter in Lassen County headed to Redding airport to be transported to Monterey assigned to the rapidly expanding Marble Cone fire.
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