I'm going home!

We had a solar field assignment yesterday in Rosemond. Left home pretty confident that the valley is in good shape, because the fire is not traveling toward us.

6:00pm, in Hemet, starving, tired and just want to get back home....looking forward to have a big burger at the local cafe...... Checkpoint creep official dummy at the bottom of the hill says we cannot go up. Roads are all closed. But Garner Valley is clear and we need to go home. He says: NO! Don't even try any of the other roads, they are all closed.

Oooooooohh reeeeeaaaally?

Well..... we are going home and you are NOT going to stop us!

Into the woods!



This is the side of Thomas Mountain, which is the range dividing the Anza Valley from Garner Valley.
We found a dirt road from Hemet to get to this mountain road.




Up and up we go, climbing the truck on the dirt road. Beautiful country side!
Missed the traffic anyway.....




Made it up to the top and looking down to Garner Valley, we have a nice view of the fire that's raging near Idyllwild.




This is the same spot on the fire we are looking at from our house back in the hills north of our valley.






Almost looks like Idyllwild is in big trouble.

3 hours later we made it home because one thing no-one should try to do is to stop Mark & Bea from a mission. We regret not having our chainsaws. We could have dropped a lot of trees behind us and gathered lots and lots of fire wood this weekend as the forest service people are too busy right now to worry about ticketing loggers.

Burning Mountains in July



The view from the front porch.




I always said: "some day those irresponsible waste of beings, the dregs of society, we are forced to tolerate in our mountain communities will burn dow these mountains." Well.....here is the day.




We have a couple more hills between the flames and the valley.




Luckily, the wind is blowing west to east (left to right) instead of towards our neighborhood.



Snowy Mountains in June



On the way to another solar field job.
At the lookout point to Burney Falls north east of Redding, CA.





Buck in the LDS church parking lot in Fall River Mills.
It's not that we are the first to arrive for the preaching;
we are testing the farm field behind the church.

 

Mount Shasta in the back.
We are surrounded by snowy mountains.



The office



One of the logging plants in the area.



Mission is accomplished.
Time to visit all the Tractor Supply stores on the way home.




Looking down to the logging mill.
Beautiful operation!
If I were born again, I'd be a logger again but have a mill like this.

It was a nice change to have snow covered mountains around. We are usually in the middle of the blazing hot desert while solar fielding. North central CA is beautiful.