June 7, 2016 - Delilah Lookout

Title: June 7, 2016 - Delilah Lookout
Trip Info : Description :   Animals 

Trip Info:

Type:  Lookout

Lookout: Delilah

Description:
Sherri and I are privileged! Five years ago we stumbled upon the Park Ridge Lookout, when it was being staffed. Even better, the staff was being trained and we were invited to put our names in for the next year's volunteers. So we did. This will be our third year staffing lookouts.

Delilah

Each year before you can staff a lookout, you need a refresher course. This year we will be trained by Brent at Delilah-we may be able to do park Ridge later on this year, but we shall see. We leave Fresno at 7:30 after voting and get to the turn off to Delilah off of Hwy 180 about 45 minutes later. Then it will take us another 45 minutes to go about 9 miles down this twisty sometimes paved, but mostly dirt road, before we see the Delilah lookout.

Brent is waiting for us. Once we climb the 80 some-odd stairs up to the lookout cabin, we start the routine of being a lookout: The radio is turned on already, along the with hand-held where we pick up the Sierra National Forest chatter. We look over the white board with its notes, then the log. At this point, we go and do the scan of the area.

Egads! There is a smoke!

And that is where the excitement starts.  After a few minutes, Sherri says, I think I see a smoke. Sure enough, so we start figuring out the place of the smoke, which we determine is just south of Summit Meadow, between Dinkey and Bald Mountains. As we get this together, we are thinking that Brent is a bit too calm and letting us walk through this. He has us call Buck Rock who has been plotting out the fire as well. When we put the two sightings together we are within a quarter mile of each other-impressive-this is from 19 miles away. It turns out this is a prescribed burn called the Providence Burn-close to Providence Creek. We get to watch this smoke all day long.

Looking north from Delilah

We do get a chance to look around. While we have seen the effects of the Rough Fire from other hikes, seeing it from Delilah gives us a sense of the vastness of the fire. Delilah sits right on the western edge of the Rough Fire. So as we look down the ridgeline, you can see green on one side and a blackish-brown on the other.  Looking across Mill Flat Creek towards Hoist and Verplank Ridges it is a see of destruction.  Even towards Lake Sequoia there is this exhibit to the fire. But right at Delilah, there is green for about 200' to the east of us-then the fire took over.

Looking southeast from Delilah

To the south of us is not black, but brown. These are trees which have died recently-I suspect after the Rough Fire. But even where there is green, the green is a faded green, showing the last resemblances of life before they die as well.

Trees, both dead and dying

Our new RAWS station

Delilah rarely receives visitors. So we are somewhat surprised when a father and his daughter arrives. he is out scouting for a place to shot, but finding everything all closed down due to trying to take care of hazards from the fire. They stay around about 20-30 minutes. Enjoyable showing them the sights. Then a crew from NOAH is setting up a RAWS station. After they are finished, they climb up the stairs and talk to us for awhile. The reason for the station is that after a fire, there is a lot of particulate matter released. They are trying to get a measure on the effect of the Rough Fire. By the way, the station is NR6G-12. You can find it by looking at findu.com.

Sierra is having a busy day. We hear on the radio a fire close to Jerseydale, which is a work center. It is called the Dove Fire, as Brent correctly guesses. A half an hour later, another smaller fire breaks out close to, but different from the Dove Fire. Later on there was a call that all suppression, detection and aircraft were on duty until 2000 hour. We called I around 6:00pm to determine if they wanted us. The bottom line was we could go.

The rest of the day was to drill on finding locations where make believe fires were, and to make sure we had the use of radio correct. Evidently we did ok. on these. Brent did give us a list of things to work on:

• When taking the weather, use the shady side
• Keep stuff off of the firefighter table and counter tops.
• When speaking on the radio, use clear text-there is a standard terminology.
• Fill out forms, double check them, then communicate.
• It is ok to mark the glass covered maps. Draw lines, arrows, dots, .. with the markers.

Brent left around 4:00pm. A good thing about a lookout station is that you get to observe so much. Outside the station is a hummingbird feeder where they come right up to you-within 3 feet of us. We stayed until 6:00pm and left after cleaning up. On the way down, we had a pizza at Bear Mountain Pizza.

Animals

One of our hummingbird friends

And another one