Two-Heel Drive

Sunday: It’s time to hand the Summit fire coverage over to the professionals. If you want up-to-the-minute updates, check out the live blog at KRON4. If you’ve got time to read a bit, check out the stories at www.mercurynews.com. The Merc’s coverage has been thorough and thoughtful.

Big stories like this make me proud and humbled to be in the news biz: proud to be helping get the word out, and humbled by the proof that professionals chasing news kick the fannies of bloggers chasing links. While I was at home in a climate-controlled apartment, my co-workers were out there with the firefighters (the true heroes, of course), breathing ash, taking pictures, scribbling in notebooks and hoping the fire didn’t take a fatal turn.

Only one major regret has emerged over the past few days: The folks desperate to know the fate of their homes within the fire lines could not find it out here. It goes against everything a newsie believes in to have to tell somebody, “sorry, don’t know that.” It’s nothing like the pain of not knowing whether a lifetime of memories has been reduced to ash, but it does sting a little bit.

In coming years, firefighters will no doubt take GPS-enabled camera phones to the fire lines to document property losses in real time, so the folks who’ve been evacuated can get on with the business of rebuilding as soon as possible. Somebody up there knows when a house burns down — it’s just a matter of getting word back to civilization. The technology already exists; people need to amass the will to make it happen.

Something else that has made me proud: the number of people whose first question was “how can I help out?”

At 6:30 this morning, CDF reported the fire covered 3,870 acres and was 50 percent contained.

Saturday

1:04 p.m.: This YouTube vid from KCRA News in Sacramento makes me think the link I posted 20 minutes ago was based on what was known Friday. As of this morning, with another couple hundred acres burnt at the edge of Uvas Canyon County Park, the fire folks are saying it could be the middle of next week before the fire’s contained.

12:38 p.m. This update from Channel 2 has cost and containment estimates I hadn’t seen before:

Almost 2,000 residents remained under evacuation orders — more than 450 of them mandatory — while almost 2,700 firefighters and a swarm of tanker planes and helicopters continued dousing the area, said Dave Shew, a battalion chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Shew said the cost of battling the blaze has risen to about $1.7 million and he expects the containment effort to continue through the weekend. “It’s going to take a little time to build 9 miles of line with manual labor,” Shew said.

11:45 a.m.: Santa Clara County Health Department issues a health advisory because of smoky air. (Note, it’s a PDF file).

“People really need to pay attention to the air quality as they consider spending time outdoors this weekend, especially when it come to doing any physical activity,” said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, Health Officer of Santa Clara County. “If you can see or smell smoke in the air, you may want to hold off on biking, running or other strenuous physical activities until the air clears.”

Individuals most at risk for illness due to smoke in the air include children, seniors and those with respiratory problems. These individuals are advised to stay inside and not go outdoors and/or exercise outside. People at risk should also avoid excess exertion and exposure to cigarette smoke and other respiratory irritants. If you develop repeated coughing, chest tightness or pain, wheezing, difficulty breathing or nausea, call your medical provider immediately.

10:45 a.m.: Forgot to post this: The Mercury News nails down where the fire started.

Fire investigators, after combing the Santa Cruz Mountains, believe they have pinpointed the spot where the treacherous Summit fire was sparked: an empty lot in the woods along Summit Road, shortly before Maymen’s Flat, at mile marker 7.53.

Planting red, blue and yellow markers, two Cal Fire investigators Friday tracked the direction of the conflagration to a clearing, closed off by a rusted chain slung between two trees. It appeared as though someone had been clearing brush there. No other information is available about the site, which is being treated as a crime scene.

Also, the KRON live chat is continuing off-site.

7:45 a.m.: Betcha didn’t know this: You can get a poison oak rash from exposure to the ashes of burnt plants.

In addition to direct contact with the plant, transmission of the allergen can occur from a number of other sources including smoke particles, contact with objects such as clothing, gloves, and tools, or contact with animals, particularly pets. When poison oak is burned, the oils can be transported on the smoke particles. Breathing this smoke can cause severe respiratory irritation.

7:30 a.m.: KRON4 has a rolling fire chat. I don’t think the station’s head Web guy has slept in three days.

Friday

1:20 p.m.: Many questions were answered (the best we could) at the Mercury News live chat. One reader passed along a link to a Google Map from CalFire that shows where the fire’s burning.

11:30 a.m.: By this time yesterday, fresh updates of the fire’s growth were coming fast and furious. Today, not much at all. Which tells us that the cool weather, calm winds and moist marine layer have (hopefully) helped firefighters contain the blaze. There’s a reason this area has had so few major fires in the last 100 years: the climate generally won’t let them spread. Yesterday morning a spark got away amid a rare combination of gusty winds following a weeklong heatwave following one of the driest springs on record. The big however: once the marine layer recedes and the afternoon breezes pick up, fresh challenges might arise. We’re not out of the woods yet. This’ll be my last update today; I’m joining the live Mercury News chat with Lisa Fernandez at noon, then it’s off to my real job.

11 a.m.: Handy link: Santa Cruz County road closures. Most caused by the Summit fire at the moment.

9:55 a.m.: KUSP Public Radio has a succinct list of fire updates and resources. Scads o’ news links, Flickr pix and Twitter tweets at this news feed.

9:40 a.m.: Mercury News Reporter Lisa Fernandez, who has been covering the fire since the first spark was reported, is doing a live a chat at noon at Mercurynews.com.

9:05 a.m.: found on YouTube: A house burning in Eureka Canyon (very shaky, but scary toward the end).

8:45 a.m.: I’ve just confirmed Mount Madonna and Uvas Canyon county parks are closed — presumably at least through the weekend.

8 a.m.: The Santa Cruz Sentinel home page has a collection of key fire info, including:

• Evacuation information: Evacuation facilities set up at Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, 2601 E. Lake Ave., Watsonville. Call (831) 458-7195.
• Red Cross: Staging at Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, 2601 E. Lake Ave., Watsonville.
• Volunteer:Volunteer Centers of Santa Cruz County, call (831) 427-5070
• Animal Services: Santa Cruz Animal Services helping with large animal evacuations. Call (831) 454-7303.

7 a.m.: Best news we’ve heard in awhile, from this morning’s Mercury News:

Friday dawned with calm, overcast skies. “There isn’t a breath of wind,” said Chris Morgan, a fire protection specialist with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “And that’s a very good thing.”

We all know how cold and moist the trails down that way are in the morning, so this is pretty much the answer to people’s prayers.

CBS5.com reported last night that a permitted burn got out of control, triggering the fire.

Today’s Merc has four inside pages of coverage. Go buy one, it’s cheap. I edited a story last night about a guy whose home, which he had built himself, burnt to the ground. “For the first time, Nathan Zazzara saw his father cry.” Heart-rending.

Mercurynews.com has a forum for the fire, where I picked up two choice tidbits: Financial assistance for pet owners … and a storage company in Morgan Hill offering two months of free storage to anybody affected by the fire.

More links:

• CDF Summit fire incident page (this will be updated throughout the day).
• U.S. Forest Service’s Active Fire Maps.
• Google map of the fire scene (zoom in to see approximate borders.)
• Cal-Berkeley’s fire information page.
• Firefighter blog’s Summit fire updates.
• Mercury News photo slide show (our shooters kick ass).
• Merc readers’ photos (They’re pretty good too).
• MTBR.com mountain bikers’ forum — these cats are mad about mapping and amassing fire links.
• Evacuation checklist.
• NBC11’s live feed.
• KRON4’s live coverage.
• ABC7’s fire news.
• Google blog search of “summit fire”

I still need to find out how the area’s parks are affected. The fire was near the western border of Uvas Canyon County Park last night and may be into Forest of Nisene Marks State Park.

The latest: MercuryNews.com update reports 20 buildings destroyed but no injuries in the fire burning near Summit Road south of San Jose. I have to go off to my real job pretty soon (this’ll lead Page 1 tomorrow — note the Mercury News is devoting four open pages of news to the fire. Get thee to a newstand tomorrow morning). The 2,000-acres-burned number is apt to be far surpassed before this one goes out. A few thoughts to chew on till the next update, most likely tomorrow morning:

• Very dry spring: We had pretty good rains till February; since then it’s been one of the driest springs on record. This means lots of dry forest hungry for a spark.
• Very high winds: Gusts topping 50 mph were reported this morning, and they’ll probably pick up in the afternoon.
• Very marginal population: Many squatters live in these hills, some of whom run meth labs. Wouldn’t be surprised to learn that one blew and triggered this whole blaze. (Glad to report this didn’t appear to be the case).

About the only bright spot is that the Pacific marine layer settles over these hills and keeps them from getting super, super dry like other areas, so perhaps with a few wind shifts and a few breaks (cool weather being the main one), this fire won’t be a terrible as it could be. Right now, though, it doesn’t look good.

(Nice pictures from this Mercury News slide show)

(My Uvas Canyon Adventure, December 2007, started out near where the fire’s currently burning)

(Nice link: Cal-Berkeley’s Center for Fire Outreach.
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Blog links from this morning:

NBC11 is covering it live. So far 1,700 acres burned (expect this number to rise rapidly, there’s nothing down there but dry trees). Raw video available at CBS5.com (Brittney at Eye on Blogs has many blog reactions).

Here’s the CalFire incident page. It’s been deemed the Summit fire. Current conditions: Temperature: 50-75 Wind Direction: E N/E Wind Speed: 37 Relative Humidity: 20 — upside: at least it’s not scalding hot, though last week’s heat wave burned off a lot of moisture in the woods. High winds, though, are trouble.

No injuries reported so far, no word on how many homes lost. But some are gone, for certain.

This just in: Shaky handheld YouTube video from the porch of somebody who lives in the hills: Background sounds include fire alerts coming over the radio.

The Merc posted this location map:

View Larger Map

They also posted this story this morning just as the fire was warming up, and have been updating all morning:

10:20 a.m.: Cal Fire officials report four to five houses have been destroyed and at least 50 more residences are threatened. Chris Morgan, a fire prevention specialist, said more than 200 firefighters are battling the blaze and more resources are being deployed “by the minute.”

With strong winds and no rain to speak of since February, the area’s ripe for a burn.

(More Twitter chatter via tweetscan)

Will update when more info comes in.

Familiar territory for Two-Heel Drive regulars:

Mount Madonna County Park has the ruins of a pioneering California land baron, as well as a herd of snow-white European deer that were the gift of a pioneering California press baron. It also has 118 shady campsites for folks still feeling a bit of that pioneering spirit.

Great place to visit, but would you want to hike there? Well, yeah.

Mount Madonna has over a hundred campsites and the ruins of a mansion built by a guy who owned nearly 2 million acres of California ranch land. It has 20 miles of trails but they’re not the main attraction. I hiked there a couple years ago and rated it merely so-so.

Yesterday I went back and could hardly believe it was the same park. It was, but this time I was walking on better trails. Which goes to show there’s always time in life for a new first impression.

Before, I hiked out of the campgrounds and stayed on the old mining and ranching roads through the park. This time I hiked into the park from the Sprig Lake Recreation Area about five miles from Gilroy on Highway 152. It has two things I like: free parking and uphill hiking at the beginning. It also had something unexpected: the Sprig Lake Trail, which marches up the hillside for a couple miles, starting out in oak woodlands and moving into thick redwood forest. It’s pretty steep, but it’s positively gorgeous. Every time I think “well, I’ve seen all the great trails around here,” I come across another like this one.

After I’d done the wake-up-the-heart-and-lungs trek up the hill, the distinctive wail of the homo erectus rug-ratus revealed campgrounds nearby. From there, Sprig Lake Trail connected to a network of trails, most of them easy and redwood-shaded, around the Henry Miller Site (Miller’s the aforementioned land baron). Old logging roads took me back down the hill to the Sprig Lake trail head.

OK, let’s check out some pictures:

A sunny day makes it pointless to imagine bringing any good pictures home from sections of trail like this — the beginning of the Sprig Lake Trail. But pictures will never capture the sensation of hiking a really nice trail like this one anyway, so maybe it’s just as well.

If you do take the Sprig Lake Trail, check out the half-mile out-and-back spur to Twin Giants, two of only four old-growth redwoods remaining in the park. A bicentennial plaque placed by the trees in 1976 says they’re certified to have been alive in the time of the American Revolution. Actually they were probably there before Columbus made landfall in this hemisphere.

A bunch of scraggly trees on the Sprig Lake Trail near the Twin Giants spur. Trails here continually enter and exit distinct forest ecosystems. Botanists must wet themselves when they come here.

You know how the rich robber barons of another era stuck together? Well, here’s one of their gifts: A white fallow deer, direct descendant of a pair of deer William Randolph Hearst gave to the descendants of Henry Miller in 1932 (he couldn’t have given them to Miller himself, as many accounts state, because Miller died n 1916). The deer live in a pen to keep them from becoming an invasive species.

Miller must’ve been important: there’s ruins where he used to live, just like the Romans.

Broken concrete stairs that presumably used to lead up to the mansion on the grounds here. Those concrete posts in the background appear to be the footings.

Redwoods abound in the trails near the Miller site.

Another excellent dangling buckeye pod.

I’m definitely glad I gave Mount Madonna another look. It’s tempting to write it off as someplace to take the kids camping, but the trails’ charms stand on their own.

Bay Nature magazine has an excellent in-depth look at Mount Madonna County Park, which gets lots of campers but not nearly so many hikers. The park is at the peak of the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains and is a fine place to freeze your fanny off in the middle a hot summer if the marine layer settles just right. Melissa and I camped out for Fourth of July Weekend in 2005 and had to bail after one night because it was just so damned cold and damp that it was no fun to hang around at a campsite. (Here’s the write-up on our first camp-out there).

The coolest story about Mount Madonna is that of its previous owner, one Henry Miller, a cattle baron who owned so much land that, according to the Bay Nature article, he could ride on horseback from Mexico to Oregon and stay each night on land he owned.

He built a huge weekend mansion at Mount Madonna, but there’s not much left of it now.

I assume it was built on these concrete pilings. His heirs had little interest in the Mount Madonna property, which found its way into the hands of the Santa Clara Count Parks Department. The forest has almost totally reclaimed the mansion site — it seems odd to have “ruins” less than a century old but I suppose that’s one more manifestation of America’s throw-away culture.

It is a nice place for car camping. The trails are often steep, but they do pass through redwood/tan oak forests to manzanita scrub and back — so there’s lots of nature watching to be had. Trails also connect to Uvas Canyon County Park and Forest of Nisene Marks State Park.

The storyline could’ve been "city slickers go camping, hilarity ensues," but there are no disasters to report — primarily because Melissa had our camp-out worked out to the tiniest detail. If an earthquake had ravaged the region, we’d have been ready.

Last week Melissa and I did some driving around and decided to stop by the campgrounds of a couple county parks maintained by the Santa Clara County parks department. The nicest one we found is called Mount Madonna, which is at the top of the Santa Cruz mountains, the range closest to the Pacific Ocean.

Here’s a look at the spot we staked out. Those tall skinny pine trees are mostly new growth because the early settlers of the Bay Area cut down most of the forests for homes and firewood. The remaining woodlands host a few ancient redwoods that somebody absent-mindedly forgot to cut down, and for that we are thankful.

Our shelter for the night is a modern-day two-person pup tent, though it’ll be a cold day in hell before any pups sleep in mine — I paid 200 bucks for this spread of nylon and zipperage and I’ll be damned if anybody’s dog smells it up.

While I was pitching the tent, Melissa was attending to our dinner. None of this "franks and beans will do on our first camp-out" for us, nosirree. Melissa bought this stupendously huge slab of tri-trip roast beef, accompanied by baked potatoes and corn.

Right off the bat we noticed the fire wasn’t close enough to the grate, so we bought a box of firewood and piled chunks of pine in the fire pit so the flames could just kiss the bottom of the meat. I figured there was no earthly way that fire would cook three to four inches of beef all the way through, but little did I know that Melissa had a master plan: once the roast was browned on both sides, she cut it up into steaks that cooked up nicely. It seemed like it took ages to get ‘em cooked, but the results were phenomenal: juicy and smoky with the flavor you get only from cooking over a wood fire rather than charcoal.

If only being cooped up elbow-to-elbow on sloping ground in that tiny tent could’ve been as pleasurable. We both had camping pads but we were sorely out of practice at getting comfortable in sleeping bags in tight quarters. We ended up unzipping Melissa’s bag all the way and throwing it over the top of us and I used my sleeping bag (another 200 bucks well spent) as a pillow. I must’ve slept some, but mostly I tossed, turned and wondered how anybody ever got a good night’s sleep under these conditions.

There were compensations, though. The sound of the wind passing through the treetops; the bracing effect of a waft of 40-degree air coming up under the tent fly. Gotta be in the woods to experience these.

The next morning we had all our gear back in the car within two hours; Melissa drove down to Watsonville to pick strawberries, which are just coming into their prime season, and I hiked about six miles on the trails of Mount Madonna County Park.

The countryside is an intriguing mix of dense pine at the upper altitudes and scrub in the lower regions. Sometimes the scrub and pine occupy the same hillsides.

These yellow wildflowers are tough little guys; they’re among the last of the season.

Splashes of pink decorate another bush.

Ah yes, progress. Apparently this is a bunch of telecommunications gear somebody forgot to pick up.

Nice thing is, the flowers grow anyway.

Yellow seems to be the dominant color of late spring.

As required, another for the "totally cool trees" file.

Here’s one of those places where all sorts of trees seem to be fighting it out for dominance.

Newsprint returns to its maker.

I swear these thistles would survive in the vacuum of space. Tough, thorny buggers. Make a mental note of that shade of green in the background; it’ll all be yellow in a few weeks.

Some brave grown-ups took a gaggle of Boy Scouts for a morning hike.

A Gold Rush-era cattle and land baron named Henry Miller owned a summer estate at the top of Mount Madonna. It fell into disrepair after he died and his heirs sold the land to Santa Clara County, which created the park. Moss-covered stone is all that’s left of his summer house

The house must’ve been built on these pilings.

Nice to see trees growing where Great Men once dwelled. In the end the forest always wins.