As tragic as forest fires are and as scary when they’re two miles from your home, watching our heroes at work expertly flying so many types of aircraft is a privilege and a truly staggering sight. We have been watching from our deck and will never forget it.
We live at 5,000 feet in a high desert valley and face the eastern slope of Mt. Rose which rises 11,000 feet. The helicopters and huge tankers (even the Global 747 Supertanker for one staggering load of retardant) have been executing stunning maneuvers against that backdrop as they repeatedly haul and dump retardant or water from our valley lake.
This small body of water (made famous on the TV show Bonanza in the opening credits) sourced from the mountains it is currently aiding makes us more fortunate than our California neighbor who has fought over 6,000 wildfires this year alone.
The blazes in California have consumed nearly a million acres, including one huge one in July that burned so fast, NASA is studying it.
My home escaped the evacuation call only because the winds blew the the Davis Creek blaze northwest. We along with 14,000+ customers had our power shut off as an emergency measure. Roads have been closed, cutting off access. Again, we were the lucky ones who got electricity back within 24 hours. Around 3,000, mostly in areas still under evacuation, have not.
Sadly, 14 structures have been lost, and just as devastatingly, so have vast swaths of the mountainside. It started low in a campground, a local treasure, on Saturday afternoon when our infamous summer zephyrs blew in and it has been climbing up the mountain since, heading towards Mt. Rose Ski Resort and north towards many south Reno communities.
Our forests are burning out of control every summer all through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Cascades, and the Rockies. So much treasured country in Canada has been devastated that it blows my mind.
- As of October 6, 2023, 45.70 million acres (18.496 million hectares) had burned in Canada due to wildfires. This was the result of more than 6,000 fires, which was the most destructive wildfire season ever recorded in Canada. The area burned was larger than England and more than double the 1989 record.
- The 2023 wildfires caused billions of dollars in property damage, displaced thousands of people, and released air pollution that traveled as far as Europe and China. The wildfires also released nearly four times more carbon than global aviation.
- In 2024, a little under 4 million acres have burned, which is below the long-term average for this time of year.
The California Dixie Fire ravaged the Sierras during the summer of 2021 when I was writing Books One and Two of The Starlight Chronicles. Our valley suffered a staggering 400+ air quality index for weeks, but we could only hurt for all the towns so severely affected. The disaster was the result of an arsonist, a college professor, who started multiple fires often right behind the firefighters, blocking them between blazes, until he was caught. Nearly a million forest acres burned along with wildlife, an entire town, and old-growth forests that will never recover in our lifetimes or generations to come.
Before it grew to nearly 1m acres and became the first known blaze to crest the Sierra Nevada, the Dixie fire destroyed Greenville in about 30 minutes, wiping away more than a century of history, displacing hundreds of residents and inflaming fears in a region already shaken by years of deadly fires. The Guardian, 2022.
One thing you will note from all of these facts, very few lives have been lost. And thousands of homes have been saved. That is due to the diligent, tireless efforts of the people on the frontlines, on the ground, and in the air.
I published Ursus Borealis and Drago Incendium in 2021 and dedicated them to the firefighters. They are truly my heroes, equal to the fiercest warriors of old, and I want to thank them again today.
I shot this zoomed-in video with my phone from my deck. It gives you an idea of how far across the mountains the fire has traveled. All those pink spots are retardant.
By D. L. Lewellyn 