Tag: wildfires

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Road Blog: Up Toward Yosemite, Rim Fire Aftermath and Bonus Comet

Along the road to Hetch Hetchy, snags still stand eleven years after the Rim Fire swept through Stanislaus National Forest and parts of Yosemite National Park.

To keep it short and sweet: We’re taking a quick trip over to the Eastern Sierra. The past few years, this has involved a drive from Berkeley and a sunset stop along the road near Tioga Pass. This time we splurged and stopped at one of the lodges west of the park. We got here in time to take a quick before-dinner walk — a walk, not a hike, since it was along the road toward the long-drowned Hetch Hetchy Valley (drowned by San Francisco, but that’s another story).

Highway 120, the main road into the park from the Bay Area, goes through part of the area that burned during the Rim Fire in 2013. Much can be said about that — I happened to be up in Yosemite on a quick trip with my nephew Sean the day the fire really blew up, and we had to get home by way of Fresno. The fire burned for a very long time and at the time became the third largest fire by area in California history. It was an epic. Just eleven years later, it ranks as the state’s twelfth largest fire — nine bigger ones, including a couple about four times as large, have occurred since 2017. The point of mentioning that is that even though the Rim Fire has probably faded from most people’s memory in the wake of all the large, destructive and deadly fires that have occurred since, the evidence of the blaze is all around us in this area.

After our walk and before dinner, we went out to try to find evidence of another spectacle, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. I was really kind of blown away by it.. Reasonably bright as the dusk deepened, with a fantastically long “tail” (or so it appeared to me). Looking forward to more sightings.

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over the Tuolumne River canyon, October 14, 2024.


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Road Blog: The Murk, Continued

Sept. 2: Highway 33, near Tetonia, Idaho, looking toward Grand Tetons from the west.
April 2018: Google Streetview image of the same stretch of Highway 33 in image above, near Tetonia, Idaho, looking toward Grand Tetons from the west.
Sept. 2: Jackson Hole from Teton Pass.
Sept. 2: Grand Teton National Park
Sept. 2: Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming,
Sept. 1: U.S. 93, north of Ely, Nevada.
August 31: Along Nevada Highway 376.

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California Fire Season: Goofing with Maps

I don’t really have too much time on my hands. I have actual work I might be doing and undoubtedly will do. But wildfires have been a major professional preoccupation this summer — here’s a current example of what I’m talking about. And visualizing where the fires are and how big they are (in both absolute and relative terms) has become part of that preoccupation.

There are lots of maps out there. For instance, both Cal Fire’s site (maintained by our state firefighting agency) and Inciweb (the site reporting fires on federal lands) both feature maps of each and every conflagration. And there are independent mapping sites — for instance, the one that created this rather amazingly detailed map of the King Fire currently burning northeast of Sacramento — that provide details that most people would never even think of (for instance, overlaying wind data on the area where the fire is burning).

But of course, if you have a map, you want another map. So I started goofing around with a site/service a colleague introduced me to several months ago, Mapbox. My original purpose was to create a map that overlaid the footprint of the King Fire (which as of today has burned 82,000 acres, or 120 square miles) on the Bay Area. In theory, that would allow Bay Area people to envision better what that burned area means in a context they may understand better than a) “82,000 acres” and b) 120 square miles. I discovered that it’s easy to find the data showing the footprint of the King Fire and others, and I wound up making the map above. Plenty of room for improvement there. For instance, including the date and size of each fire.

The execution of my original concept, accomplished with my crude beginner’s skills in Photoshop, is below. I tweeted that image, and someone out there on the twtinternets suggested I could make this image more interesting by rotating the overlaid fire footprint so that it’s aligned better with the San Francisco Peninsula. Well, maybe I will.

kingfireoverlay.jpeg