Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Fire in the Park

As everyone around LA has heard (or smelled, or seen, or wiped the ash off of their car and discovered), Griffith Park is burning away. Makes me a little sad as it is such a fun place to go hiking right in the middle of the city. In fact one of my most rewarding hiking moments was making it to the Hollywood sign from the Observatory. I was determined to figure out the route on my own and it took me a few tries, but it ended up being a great day. All will regrow and nature will recover, but I sure wish I had taken the time to hike up there recently as my favorite trails won't be the same for a very long time.

I headed out to the LA River at Los Feliz after work to watch the water dropping CDF planes do their thing. It was an amazing show. I took a few pictures with my camera phone:

Griffith Park Fire
There was a small crowd hanging out. You can't really tell in the picture, but there was also a woman with her 2 horses watching the fire to see if it started heading back towards the equestrian areas of the park.

Griffith Park Fire
One of the CDF planes making a drop. That is a tremendous amount of water. I heard that it would do serious damage to a house if they missed their target.

Griffith Park Fire
Things started to get much worse as I decided to head home. Power was going out, people were starting to evacuate and I didn't want to be in the way.

It is a bad sign for the fire season this year if a homeless man falling asleep with a lit cigarette on a golf course can cause all of this.

You can check out all of the pictures I took on Flickr.

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