Well, the winds they have begun a-blowing here, as predicted, about an hour ago and, as also accurately predicted by the Incident Team's on-staff meteorologist, with a weird turn of events: Whereas yesterday the winds blew heavily downstream and pushed the fire over the ridge upstream from us, only to burn all night, now the winds are blowing upstream creating, in effect, a backfire lit by the fire on itself. As you can see from the (blessedly few) photos Stephanie will be kind enough to attach to this noon report, smoke is abundant and, just as I am typing, our first helicopter (complete with bucket) is overhead and dropping water on the growing hot spots.
Concern for us now focuses not so much on the burn across the Creek from us (yes, of course, that is till a minor concern), but, rather, three miles upstream at mile marker (lucky) thirteen where, last evening the Bear Gulch branch of the fire heatedly burned down into creek side brush and, early this morning, was already kicking up quite a volume of smoke, and, therewith, heat. We have plenty of land crews assigned to our neck of the woods today (who effectively serve as our lookouts) while we ourselves keep our own close eyes on just what is going on around us in case we need to make a hasty departure--things can and will change that quickly around here.
Being only half bleary eyed, let me correct my prior bloggy relocation of Sulfur Mountain to Yosemite (yes, I know it lives in Yellowstone)--in either locale, however, such a smoke/steam oozing visage is just what I have now looking upstream (where the fires burned mightily all last night--how about those night shots, by the way??...it was John Horton who took those with me, by the way, NOT John Menson [who, I know first hand, would be mortified to be associated with such craziness, or at least highly chastised by his (wonderful) wife!]).
So there's your noon report form the zero ground--just another relaxing Montana day complete with rotor blades overhead, smoke everywhere and the hillside across the creek from us still nicely ablaze.
Happy Sunday to all--we haven't seen much of the form of that compound word today, by the way!
RCR
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