Tag Archives: fire

Alaska, Fishing

Fire Comes to Yes Bay

Well, another summer, another fire. It’s almost a year ago that I fled for my life from the CZU Fire. That was an experience that I hoped to not have to go through again. Unfortunately, I very nearly had it happen once more. I’m starting to think that fire has it in for me or something!

It all went down this past Saturday night. It was around 8:30 and I was in the laundry room, accessing the Internet. It’s directly underneath the wi-fi hotspot in the office and only a few steps away from my room so I go there sometimes in the evenings to get online. It’s one of three spots where I can get a somewhat decent connection. While I was persuing the web, my co-worker Brianna ran by yelling something about a fire. Alarmed, I raced upstairs to see what was going on. I ran into some of my co-workers and they filled me in.

It seemed that the boys that take out the swill (food scraps and fish carcasses) to the back bay spied smoke and flame coming from the forest behind the lodge. They take the swill back there so the local bear population doesn’t equate the lodge with food. Lucky for us they took it back there that day instead of out in front of the lodge like they sometimes do. The winds were blowing the smoke the opposite direction from the lodge and we couldn’t see the flames because it was around the point right out front. Speaking of the wind, it had been really breezy all day. Also we had several days of warm dry weather, so the conditions were ripe for fire.

We heard that the fire was burning up on the boundary line between the lodge and Tongass National Forest land. There is a trail that led right up to the fire site, it’s the one that I cleared the second week I was here actually. Since I knew the way I led a contingent up there. As we made our way up the trail, the smell of smoke began to fill the air. Right at the end of the trail, big clouds of smoke started to billow out ahead of us. Suddenly, we found ourselves confronted with the fire! We were on the edge of a 200 foot cliff and the fire looked as if it had started down at the waterline and burned all the way up to where the canopy shaded the mossy ground. It seemed that there was enough moisture there to stop the leading advance of the fire.

The fire was still a huge danger, as trees were burning down the slope and several big stumps were smoking from ground level. The fire was down in the roots. By this point the wind had stilled which was a good thing. All it would take is for the wind to blow in from the west and there would be nothing stopping it from burning its way to the lodge. The generator with several hundred gallons of diesel was only about 500 yards away and if it hit that, it would be disasterous! We needed to contain the fire and do it fast, as night was falling and who knows how much time we would have before we got wind from the wrong direction. Time was of the essence.

Heading down towards the flames. The cliff was very close to this spot, one wrong step and the fall would be fatal.

We saw that we needed more than the shovels we had brought to contain the fire, so we went back to the lodge to rustle up some fire extinguishers. What we really needed was water but there was no way to get it there. Back at the lodge, we ran into the boss and informed him of the situation. He and some of the captains gathered up all the water hoses they could and headed down to the Waterhorse to try and fight the fire from the water. He was going to try and hook the hoses up to the boat’s spigot and see if that would work. Meanwhile the rest of us on hand grabbed every extinguisher we could find and headed back up the trail.

The sun had already slipped below the horizon when we returned to the fire site. We began to hit every spot that had visible embers and flames. While we did this, a couple of guys deployed a rope they grabbed off a shrimp trap that was long enough to reach the water. They slung it off the cliff to land next to the Waterhorse and the guys below tied the hose to it. We then pulled it up towards us, and after some wrangling managed to get it all the way to the top. Down below they turned on the water, and nothing happened. The water pressure from the boat was insufficient to reach all the way up to us. Even if it had, it would have been like pissing on a housefire. We needed serious water flow.

It was around 10:30 when we decided to pull out. It was too dark to see and we were in grizzly territory. Not to mention the aforementioned cliff we were on the edge of was even more of a risk when we couldn’t even see where we were stepping. None of us knew what we were doing, but out here in the bush, help is a long ways away. We had a full house of guests we needed to protect, so we did the best we could with what we had but it wasn’t enough. We hoped what we had done was enough to contain the fire until we could get professional help the following day. Three guys volunteered to take shifts to watch the fire and to radio back if it started to spread again.

Back at the lodge, the boss took out this big pump from storage along with a few hundred feet of firehose he had stored for just such an occasion. He got it running, but as it was so dark he decided to postpone loading it on the boat and fighting the fire until first light the following morning. We all decided to call it a night and to get some shut-eye. I didn’t get to sleep until very late, and had bad dreams about fires and fleeing flame. I slept very poorly, all the anxieties from the past came rushing back and I kept waking up in a panic.

The next morning I got up and went down to the dock to see how things were progressing. The boss and a few guys were down there and the news wasn’t good. The attempt to hose down the fire from the boat had failed when the hose (that wasn’t built for pressure but for volume) blew up when they turned on the pump. It was the only kind of hose we had so the boss was on the horn to the Forest Service to come out and fight the fire. They were dicking around and weren’t getting back to him, so he was on the verge of hiring a private helicopter to come drop buckets of water on the thing. Right as he was about to do that, the Forest Service finally got back to him and said they’d send out some people. What a relief! Finally we had the cavalry on the way.

A couple hours later a couple cutters arrived with several firemen. I volunteered to take the captain of the crew up the trail to the fire site. When we got there things looked a lot better then they had yesterday. It was still smokin’ up pretty good, but it hadn’t spread. In the daylight, I could see that the fire’s footprint was probably about 60-70 yards wide and most of it was inaccessible due to the steep cliff. The day was overcast with more moisture in the air and the winds were still which helped out a lot. Still, the remains of the fire needed to be dealt with as it was still very much a danger as long as even one ember remained.

The firefighters ran a hose from a beach down below the cliff and worked on it all afternoon. I wasn’t able to see the efforts in person as I still had my job to do, but I got reports that things were going well. Finally, the firefighters came over to tell us that they were pretty certain they got it put out completely and that we were in the clear. What a relief!

There had been a lot of speculation as to what had caused the fire, some thought it was from an earlier garbage burning on the other side of the bay, some thought it was arson. According to the firefighters, the fire was caused by a lightning strike. Now, the day the fire started was hot and sunny, and no one heard any thunder. The boss said that he saw a lone black cloud pass overhead around the time the fire must have started (I saw it as well) that could have been capable of sending out bolts. Supposedly lightning can strike without thunder, it is rare but can happen. I guess this is what happened in this case. Just one of those ‘Acts of God’ I reckon.

Anyways, it was a joy to see people win the war against fire this time. It was pretty touch-and-go there for a while, but I was really proud of the work we did as a crew to band together and do our best to save the day. It was a real bonding experience. For not having any idea what we were doing we did pretty damn good. I think the firefighters were pretty impressed at our containment job. I never thought I’d be doing volunteer firefighting work at this job, but you never know what to expect around here. Anything can happen out in the Alaskan bush!

This is called a red banded rockfish and was pulled up from 900 feet this past Thursday. I’ve never seen a rockfish with such brilliant color!

So after all the fire business was handled, my day off arrived. I was anticipating my return to the honey hole for my rematch with Team Salmon. This time I had my new collapsible pole to take with me to give me an edge. Unfortunately, my new net that I had ordered hadn’t come in yet. Devin let me borrow his however, so I was set! The day before, my co-worker who does freshwater guiding told me the stream and lake was teeming with fish even more than last week so I was stoked. I headed up there looking forward to getting into some good fishing.

I arrived at my spot and got all set up. There was a little bit of drizzle going on, but it wasn’t anything my foul-weather gear couldn’t handle. I noticed that the water was quite a bit lower and there were many more fish there than last time. There wasn’t a place in the stream you couldn’t see fish actually! On my very first cast I caught a big cutthroat trout. He was a fiesty little joker. He leaped all over the place like he was a bass when caught! It would have been good eating, but I was looking for sockeye or coho (silver) salmon. Back into the creek he went.

The highway of fish was even more of a traffic jam than last time.

My first cut-throat trout. Pretty big fella, he would have been great skillet fare but I was looking for his more desirable salmonid relatives.

My second cast, I hooked up. This time it was a salmon! It gave me a merry fight, but after a few jumps and runs I managed to land it. Having the net was a game-changer, but there was enough of a beach there from the low water that I almost didn’t need it. Unfortunately, the salmon was a pink, the least desirable of the salmon species. Don’t get me wrong, pinks aren’t bad or anything. The pale, pink fillets are nothing compared to the taste and the look of the deep red of the sockeye and silver fillets. They’re best for smoking (or dog food, as they say around here). Also, the pinks are undergoing the change they go through when they start to spawn. They get this zombie sort of look and are pretty funky-looking. Not something I’d want to eat. The males also get this hooked mouth and hump on their back that makes them look even more weird.

My first shore caught salmon. Not a good looking fish.

I revived the salmon after the landing and it swam off to rejoin its buddies. My third cast hooked a salmon, but it broke off. “Hot damn!” I thought. It’s on today!” Indeed it was. Never in my life had I been in such a target-rich environment with such large fish. I actually kept missing fish once they got on. I solved this by swapping the tiny treble hooks my lures came with the big trebles that my new 1 oz Crocodile lures came with. Then I was able to get better hooksets in the hard mouths of the salmon. My second salmon was similar to the first, but the third was a real beauty. It looked like the ones they catch out on the boats out to sea. It was yet another pink but it was the biggest one I’d catch all day.

What a stunner! I think it was a female. She put up one hell of a fight!

It was around this point I was actually starting to get tired of catching fish! Since the water was so low, I was constantly getting snagged and had lost a couple lures. It seemed like there were nothing but pinks out there. Plus, the drag on my new Daiwa reel was getting quite a workout and I hate to stress my gear out for no reason. I’ll have to admit that it was super fun and impossible to walk away from the aggressive bite! So I kept on until I had landed & released 6 fish and probably lost a dozen more. It was getting time for me to get back to the lodge in time for dinner so I got packed up and headed back down the trail.

My last fish of the day. Note the hooked upper jaw and hump in the back. This one was almost purple, not the way a salmon you’d want to eat would look.

Well, I have to say that I got my revenge on the salmon! I built upon the skills I learned last week and got in some good practice on salmon angling this time around. These skills will come in handy when the sockeye and silvers start running hard. In the next week or two we’ll start seeing dead salmon start to wash down the creek, their spawning done. They’ll pile up at the mouth of the creek and the bears will start coming into sight of the lodge to feast. I suppose I’ll have to be really on alert at that time going up to my fishing hole. Since the bears will be full of salmon I doubt they’ll pay me much mind, I’m not worried about it. I look forward to seeing the bears! I’ve been here two months and I’ve not seen any. I’m ready to remedy this situation!

This week marks the halfway mark of my time here. It’s all downhill from this point. Actually the longer I’m here the faster the days seem to fly by. Now I’m looking forward to things like seeing the sockeye and silver salmon run and the start of the king salmon season on the 15th. The end is not yet in sight, but I’m a good ways down the road.

We’ve arrived at what the lodge vets call ‘Angry August’. It’s when you’re at the point that everyone is starting to crack up and the end is still too far away to be of much use to one’s sanity. The cracks are beginning to show, there’s definitely a lot more bitching and complaining going on in the crew than previous. I’m actually doing pretty good, I’m actually no more at my wit’s end than I was before so I guess I’m in a good spot! I’ve still got a lot of fishing to do and money to make first. I’m real glad to mark this milestone in my stay here though. There’s still a lot of Dogfish Tales yet to come I’m sure! Till next time!

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CZU Lightning Complex Fire

Runnin’ From the Devil

So just an hour after I uploaded my last post, our next-door neighbor up on the mountain came over and told us that people in the community were starting to talk about evacuating. Immediately I grabbed my guitar, my fishing poles, and my clothes & bedding. Since I had just moved my stuff into the cabin it took a minute to pack everything back into The Beast all haphazardly.

After all this was done, I settled in to eat some blackeyed peas and rice I had just made. My thoughts were that I should eat as much as I can in case I needed the energy to flee. The fires off in the distance didn’t seem to be growing, and the winds were still. Unbeknownst to us, there was a vicious 40 mile per hour offshore wind blowing in from the north that was being blocked from that direction by mountain ridges. I could have never known that those peas and rice were almost my last meal.

I had just finished my dinner and was sitting around relaxing, it was around ten o’clock I think. I heard Jacob and The Professor yelling and hollering from Jacob’s cabin, they were watching the Trailblazers game and getting all worked up. I smiled at my friends having something to distract them from the tense situation. I got up to take a leak outside when I heard this roar I couldn’t quite place coming from behind our cabins up on the ridge. Since we don’t face that direction, I hadn’t noticed what was going on behind us. The night sky in that direction was bright orange and red, and the sound I heard was like a whole airport of jet engines taking off all at once.

I stood for a full minute trying to process what I was seeing, and at the moment when I realized what was about to happen, the next door neighbor ran over and told us it was time to get the hell out of Dodge! The Fear washed over me like a flood as I grabbed whatever was in my immediate vicinity. Since I had the only fridge/freezer on the property, all our salmon was stored there. Jacob ran over and we both grabbed as much fish as we could. What a true fisherman he is, he got his frozen fillets safe at the last minute. I don’t even think he thought to grab hardly anything else.

We made a quick check to see if we were all ready to go, and within 3 minutes we were convoying down the mountain. As we rounded the turn to head down, I turned to look back and saw the first flames crest the ridge. It was like looking at the face of the Devil. We sped down Last Chance Rd. as fast as we could go. A couple of times I had to check myself when I fish-tailed. I knew if I wrecked or worse, blocked the road somehow, it could trap myself and everyone behind me who was in full flight.

That 30 minute drive down the mountain was the longest drive I had ever made in my life. It was an intense white-knuckled experience all the way down. The whole mountainside to our right was on fire and was heading our way, and we knew that it was the same behind us. Incredibly, there were a couple vehicles actually going BACK UP the mountain! What fools! They had no clue, I yelled at them to turn around as we went by but that’s all I could do. As we continued downhill, more and more vehicles joined our convoy. I was glad to see that people had gotten the word to get out.

Close to the bottom, we ran into a CalFire engine that was blocking the road, stopping traffic. For a horrifying moment, I thought that our escape route was blocked by fire and they were prepared to make a last stand with us. Fortunately, they were just trying to get themselves staged to head back into the inferno that we had fled from. As we made our way down the last stretch, there must have been 10 CalFire engines headed back up. God bless the cavalry! I whooped as I passed them. Such brave men and women they are.

At long last we hit Swanton Road, and just short of Highway 1 we stopped to let everyone catch up. The Professor, Redwood (our neighbor who initially gave us the head’s up) and I were together, but Jacob lagged behind. He rolled in a couple of minutes behind us, he was delayed after trying to warn his neighbors about the firestorm who might not have known what was about to go down.

We all agreed to go down to Waddell Creek beach to get a look back up the mountain at the fire before we went to our evac house in westside Santa Cruz. We got there and the fire was already burning down all the way to the highway. A CalFire dozer operator was staged there and he let us listen to his radio to hear what was going on back up the mountain.

It sounded like a war zone on the comm. “We’re getting overrun, fall back, fall back! The fire has jumped Last Chance Road, get off the mountain!” is what we heard. I’m glad they didn’t get enveloped and got out of there. There is nothing to be done when you’re faced with 50 to 100 foot walls of fast-moving fire except to run for your life. The fireman was a 15 year vet of the service from the Central Valley and he said this was one of the most intense fires he had ever seen. He’s like, “I hate to tell you boys, but this ain’t looking good.” We agreed that it sure wasn’t looking good at all. If we had delayed our departure by 15 minutes, we wouldn’t have made it out.

The view from Waddell Creek beach looking back up the mountain towards Last Chance across Highway 1. The glow on the right was our escape route on fire moments after we left it.

After having a beer to steady our nerves, we decided to get down Highway 1 to safe harbor. The ash was thick and stuff was falling out of the sky on our retreat. Some giant rock or chuck of debris slammed into my driver’s side door around Scott’s Creek, no doubt lofted into the air by some explosion back up the mountain. I’m glad it didn’t hit higher up in my window, as it might have taken me out.

Jacob had a friend over in westside Santa Cruz that said it was fine if we crashed at her place. We rolled up and she had plenty of tequila and space for us to relax. She was an angel, I so much appreciate her opening her home to us. Over the course of that night and the next day the situation was super tense. We had no idea what the fire was going to do, it seemed like it was capable of burning down the world.

We had word that there were fires to the east and the south that were just as bad. At one point I was going to go down to the harbor where I used to live and go out as far as I could on the jetty rocks to escape if I had to. The fire was moving so fast towards westside Santa Cruz, it was not much of a stretch of imagination to see it burning up the city. Fortunately, the winds died and the firefighters managed to cut some burly firelines north of UCSC to protect the town pretty fast.

After a couple of nights on the Westside, I decided to relocate to Catdaddy’s house outside Watsonville. He lives halfway down the Monterey Bay, a good distance away from the fire-trap mountains. This area is full of fields and agriculture so there are natural fire-breaks at his spot. The air quality is so much better here than back in Santa Cruz. Also, my guns, cot frame and mattress were (thankfully) stored in my storage unit in Scott’s Valley out of the fire’s reach, so I wanted to scoop them up. There were rumors that Scott’s Valley was about to evac however, so I wanted to go get my stuff out of the path of possible devastation.

Sure enough, not long after I got my gear out of storage, Scott’s Valley had a mandatory evacuation order. I was so glad to get myself and my essentials out of harm’s way. I’m never going to let a natural disaster out-flank me again if I can help it. The past five days or so Catdaddy, his awesome lady Kellsie, our good friend Jenny and their dog Mr. Wu have been hosting me at their house.

A couple of days ago, Jacob and The Professor came down to join us. It was agreed that we all needed to do something to get our minds off all this horror, so we went salmon fishing. I’ve always said that, when in doubt, go fishing! We caught a couple of 10 lb’ers and were blessed with perfect conditions. We spent 12 hours out on the water. The Professor landed his very first salmon, and the joy he expressed upon doing so helped dispell a lot of the gloom we’ve all been feeling the past week.

  • Catdaddy getting the Sea King ready in the smoky morning sunlight.
  • The Professor was so stoked with his first King Salmon!
  • The sea was just chock-full of jellyfish, complicating our downrigging.

So now, the question is, what next? We’re all in survival mode here still, we’re not out of the woods yet by a long stretch. One of our neighbors went up to our mountaintop the next day to report all was vaporized at our place. I lost a lot of treasured items for sure. The biggest one was a vial of ashes I had from a dear friend’s cremation I had stashed in with my fishing gear. For some reason I grabbed my freshwater tackle box, but not my saltwater tackle box or this bin that had all my other fishing gear in it, including the ashes. The other great losses were my month’s supply of emergency food, (I’m really kicking myself in the ass for that one), a vintage WW2 machete a wise old wizard gave me 20 years ago back when I lived in Hawaii, and all my camping & kitchen gear.

All of that ain’t nothing compared with what Jacob lost though. All he got out with was his truck, his dogs and his laptop. He lost all he had worked for the past five years up on the mountain. We didn’t have time to grab the cats. Mama Cat, her kitten, and Papa Cat are gone. His neighbor actually had the most horrific tale of escape that made regional headlines.

He had packed up his truck, but when the fire came up he had misplaced his keys. He took his neighbor’s car with pet bunny in hand, but the window wouldn’t roll closed. He made it out right behind us, but the flaming debris came into the car through the open window and blew up something inside. He then had to ditch the car and spent the rest of the night running from the flames on foot. He came across some firefighter in the AM who gave him a lift out at the bottom of the mountain. It was astonishing he made it out alive.

When we got to the bottom of the mountain, we heard that there were 4 people unaccounted for from the Last Chance community. I heard that yesterday that 3 of the 4 eventually turned up, but that one poor feller’s body was found in the ashes. I heard from Jacob he was a hermit who had bad knees and no phone, and so wasn’t dialed in to the community evac warning. A lot of people lived that way up there, I’m surprised that there weren’t more deaths. Hell, if we hadn’t seen it with our own eyes, we wouldn’t have gotten out as clean as we did. The fire moved so fast it even took CalFire off guard.

For now, we’re holding strong here. I just want to let whoever reads this communique know how important it is to have a disaster plan. Whether it is fire, tornado, earthquake, or hurricane, BE PREPARED. IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU EVENTUALLY. The state and federal goverments are stretched to the limits, it is up to YOU and your communities to take care of each other. Assume there ain’t nobody else to do it because they more than likely can’t help.

We had a solid fire plan with CalFire, but they didn’t show up until the horse had already escaped the barn. There was no official warning either. I’m not faulting them at all, I’m sure they had to triage their response with the boots they had on the ground. A lot of their ground crews are usually made up of prisoners who are in lockdown now due to COVID. There was a huge shortfall in what is essentially slave labor that the state has always leaned upon. That, coupled with perfect environmental conditions led to this debacle.

We’ve got a long road to recovery here. They are saying it could be weeks until they let people back into the affected areas, and who knows how long until they can get the utilities restored. When the winter rains come, there’s going to be bad mudslides everywhere since there’s few trees left to hold up the hillsides. At last count, there are are somewhere around 80,000 refugees in the Santa Cruz area alone. I think there are 275,000 people displaced statewide from the other massive fires. Things are never going to be the same. I guess 2020 is the wretched gift that keeps on giving.

Anyways, keep calm and carry on out there everyone. Dogfish out.

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