I'll be posting some video tours of the lookout on YouTube soon. [View All]

[DemoTex]

I'll also have the video camera running on a tripod when storms strike again (maybe tomorrow night). I wish I had known earlier that my little Canon does such great videos. A video of Sunday night's storm with sound would have been awesome.

Lots of fires again today. My visibility was reduced to less than three miles at times due to smoke from northern Cali fires. I had to tag-team with my buds on Engine-34 to fix a smoke that was so weak I couldn't see it through the fire-finder. I saw it from the catwalk through my big 20X60 tripod-mounted Pentax binocs. I picked out some prominent snags to use as aiming stakes, and lined the snags up in the fire-finder. I got an azimuth and very rough legal (TRS) that way.

The E-34 crew located on a small knoll at the south ice caves cinder pit and gave me a mirror flash. That way I had them pin-pointed. A few minutes later they called with an azimuth on a wisp of smoke they spotted near my rough estimate. I plotted the crossing of the two azimuths, gave them a revised location, and they hiked in. Ten minutes later they were on the fire!

Bossman called, ECSTATIC! We had used all the low-tech tools available and we had nailed that fire the old fashioned way. Then the battalion commander called: "How did you do that? You guys are great!" Four hours later I found E-34 another fire (see pic). They are still down there on it now.


The calm between the storms.


One of today's fires. My visibility was drastically reduced by smoke from north California fires.