It starts.
I went out to get the mail with the kids yesterday and heard the helicopter. We live about a mile from the hospital which sports a helipad so it's not unusual. This one sounded different, though. Deeper, bigger. I looked up and around and spotted it quickly: smoke. Not far off, about two miles south.
Soon enough, the Fire Bosses started making their all-too-familiar loops between the fire and the Columbia River. In between the two, again, was our house.
Thankfully, this fire was small. With that helicopter, two Fire Bosses, and a pair of Aeroflite Bombadiers, it was out pretty quick.
The storms building to the north eventually produced visible lightning as close as four miles from us later in the evening.
Once doused, the Bosses and Bombadiers made a few more circles before heading back to their respective bases (possibly Ellensburg and Spokane).
As mentioned, some cool storms erupted later in the evening. Rarely over us (we got a smattering of rain), always around us.
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Poor Rooster Comb, the rock outcrop atop the foothill that caught fire yesterday. It's a great trail run, and the beginning of the half-marathon route I weaved from our doorstep through the foothills behind our house.
Not quite two years ago, a guy was out with a welder too close to grass. Brilliant. A spark caught, lit, and took off up the backside of Rooster Comb. It was a much bigger fire. It climbed a thousand feet and lept over the ridge on our side, then down with impressive speed. It was August. Everything was dry.
Then in came the brigade.
They made loops over our house between Rooster Comb and the River. They were surprisingly loud, maybe a thousand feet above ground level.
In the photo below, just below the Odabashian Bridge, a Fire Boss touched down on the Columbia, scooped up water and headed back to the fire. It sure is convenient, the River.
Then came the Big Guns. For real. Along with the circling command center.
That's an Erikson MD-87 Aero Tanker. Essentially, a 737. We watched in awe as an aircraft that large took a nose dive to the hillside and then immediately crawled back into the air with all its might.
It had to lower the landing gear to slow down enough to make the nose dive and drop. The pilot wasn't going in blind, however. They had a guide aircraft that would fly ahead and release a smoke signal where to drop the retardant. It was incredible to watch, the mastery of flying.
Below, the guide plane climbs while the massive DC-87 drops its load.
Quickly, the hillside beneath Rooster Comb was caked in fire retardant. It did its job and held back the flames from leaping over and down toward where a home lay we had toured before buying ours. Also, lots of other houses.
Yeah, that thing is maybe a hundred feet off the deck. Flying through thick smoke. Damnnnnnn… As if one of those wasn't enough, his little brother joined the fray.
Sefton drew pictures of the flight paths. Pretty adorable, and observant. Little did he know, you can go online with the call sign (or tail number) of an aircraft and get its flight path. For this kind of work, it looks exactly what that little four year-old drew.
He also drew the fire…
We were close enough and the fire was big enough that ash was falling on our property…
Eventually, we went in to make dinner. The airplanes, all nine of them, retreated to their bases. We watched the ground crew work from our balcony that night. The fire smoldered.
The beacon above town told a different story of sorts…
That was the third fire within view of our house that year. It had been a dry summer. Nowadays it's always a dry summer. We're already off to another.
What is amazing, through the smoke and flames, is watching these fire crews do what they do best. In retrospect and comparing it to the two previous fires that summer, K and I both noted they hit this one hard. They weren't messing around. That was a lot of firepower (pun intended, I guess).
I was back up running there a couple of weeks later. The following spring, the balsamroot were back and the sagebrush was greening up. Life goes on, as does each and every fire season.
