Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Life on a Mountain: Fire and Snow

We're back from Canada. The trip was a lot of fun and Thunder Bay is gorgeous. I'll write a post about the trip once I get my photos organized a bit better.

But, the one huge dark cloud over our time away was that the canyon we live next too suffered a wildfire. The fire got within 200 yards of homes. It was on the front (west) side of the mountain and we are the south east which was a small conciliation but as the hours progressed and the fire swelled to over 800 acres our fears grew. One of the last new stories I heard was a story celebrating how the fire had quit b urning down the mountain towards homes ( a very good thing) but had gone around the side and up the back - which is directly where we are. I checked our neighborhood association and they assured homeowners that at the present moments our homes were safe but five fire trucks were patrolling our neighborhood to wet homes down if the fire got closer. Here are some pictures most are from our street:






We were very happy to see the fire was completely out when we got home but sad to see so much of the mountain a black charred mess. While the worst damage occurred at the front of the mountain, here are a few pictures from our porch to show how close it came:





And in other news, we came home to the mercury hovering between 100 and 102 on Saturday. Sunday night a big storm brought snow. SNOW!!!! On August 31st! and then Monday was a chilly 52 degrees. That's a pretty big swing in the weather! The snow line is around 8000 feet and we're just over 6000 so we've got a few weeks left before winter. Here's a pic:



I'll post more later. Hugs all around.

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