Every time I hear someone talking about Yosemite (although lately it hasn’t been for the best reasons), I think about how I really oughta go check that place out. I’ve lived in Northern California for most of my life, and yet I have never visited one of the nation’s great treasures. So… I decided to go.
And it turns out that it was just as glorious as I had heard: beautiful waterfalls, lush forests and blackened mountains. Wait, that doesn’t seem right.
Oh right, turns out some jerk’s camper caught fire and burned the place down. Bummer, eh?
The “Motor Fire,” which is still burning as of press time (a week after starting), is proving to be one stuburn bastard (as far as fires go). This is primarily because it has spread into a hard to reach area, among some of “the most treacherous terrain in the country.” Better call in the big guns!
Yes, I am referring to myself. I was called into action and got shipped off to this wild wilderness in the name of News… it was a 4 hour drive to the fire’s command post, only to discover that the fire had burned over a ridge that couldn’t be seen from where we were. Bummer.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t news to be made! We lucked out and happened to stumble upon a river where helecopters were filling up their water supplies to attack this raging inferno.
Now every journalist has those days where they question their career path, whether it’s because they’re covering a story that they don’t want to cover or witnessing somehting they don’t want to see. But every now and again they get to cover something that is just flat out cool, and those days are what keep us going. This was one of those days for me, with three helicopters cycling over us to refill their water supply and dump on the hill we were standing beside. How many people get to see that in their average work day? I really have no reason to complain.
Although I must admit that every time I saw that helicopter, I couldn’t help but think that it looked like the Dukes of Hazzard car, in helicopter form. Am I wrong? If they only honked the horn…
Anyway, we took off the next day, with the fire mostly under control and evacuees returning to their homes. We were never exposed to the crazy inferno that I had pictured on the way out, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t still an element of danger to the whole endeavor…
