July 2, 2020 - Delilah Lookout

Title: July 2, 2020 - Delilah Lookout
Hike Info : Description :  Background 

Trail head: Delilah Lookout

Hike Info:

Type: Lookout

Description:

I woke up just before my alarm-never liked waking up to an alarm. I get a few things ready for today and then read for a few minutes.I say bye to Steven before he goes off to work. I then checked to see if any lightning happened yesterday. None-and that is what I expected. About this time Sherri gets up. I have my breakfast. She does her last stages of her getting ready.

Sherri Unpacking Us

We get out of Fresno a bit late, around 0720. But it is better not to cry, or gripe, over spilt milk. The trip up is pretty uneventful. There are two construction sites which have us stopping. But not for long. Purple flowers are along the road to Delilah. Pretty for them to serenade us on our way in. We got to Delilah around 0915.

Now to hurry into the cab while sanitizing everything. I get enough going to turn on the radio and go in-service on time at 0930, after hearing both Park Ridge and Buck Rock go in-service. We have four days up here.

So I am thankful for the pulley system which has been rigged up here. Unfortunately I take a couple of times to get it right. If you have the rope going one way, it works against you and makes it harder to pull up the basket with your belongings. But once I get it working, much better than being a water sherpa.

I should insert here, that one of the first things we do when we get into the cab is to read the daily log from the past couple of days. But today, we had a special note from our friend Judy. It gladden our hearts.

Sherri is still collecting stuff to bring up. So I take the weather. Note to Gary: do not try to do two things at once. Why might you ask? One thing was just looking around for a fire. The other thing was to figure out the relative humidity? To do that you twirl around two thermometers,dry bulb, the other wet and then compare the temperatures one with a . If you are not paying attention, you might hit something, maybe like a rain gauge. Do you know how easy those things shatter? We have a spare one up here. So it is a bit of embarrassment and I do not liking to do stupid stuff, at least too often.

The 1000 weather and staffing is broadcast, Unlike the last time I was here, I am able to get the information online. The 1100 Sierra Lookout checking also comes and goes. Afterwards, I talk with Buck Rock about an assortment of stuff, including a broken thermometer.

We settle down into a pattern of scanning, refreshing, and identifying of landmarks in our area. Sort of the mundane part of this gig. But that is why we get paid the big bucks in sunsets isn’t it?

At 1402 on one of my scans, I start with looking towards the southwest, if you must know, at an azimuth of 230. It looks like a smoke! (See photo below) This is one of those times where luck and experience meet and results in something positive. A couple of years ago, there was a fire in the same area, just north of there. So I knew exactly where this smoke was. So it did not take much for me to determine the distance, 14 miles and the location. being on Hills Valley Road. Within a couple of minutes of seeing the smoke, Sherri and I called in the smoke to Porterville. The dispatcher said that CalFire had handled the fire and it was out.

Interesting. We watched it for a couple of minutes. The smoke was getting larger. About that time Buck Rock called and we discussed the situation. I called up Porterville again. This time a different dispatcher indicated that the fire was not within their dispatch area and there was no response agreement. That makes more sense than saying the fire is out when we can see it is growing. This does lead to the question where is the edge of which we should be calling. It was my understanding that on the Valley floor, do not call. This is right at the edge of the foothills and valley. In looking up some e-mails, we have been told to report things east of the Kern-Friant Canal. This is about a mile east.

Road to Converse Basin. Someplace in the middle of this, Sherri, Steven and I hiked down road 13S03 on June 17, 2020

The rest of the afternoon is pretty mundane. Park Ridge is using the smoke as a training exercise. So they were wondering what the particulars of the call were. I am looking through some of the WildCAD logs both for CalFire, Porterville and for Sierra just to see if there is anything pertaining to us or if there is a lightning caused fire. My eye comes across an entry on Sierra for a resource order for a Hills fire near Orange Cove for Sierra. That's our fire! That raises a lot of questions in my mind. Does Sierra respond to fires in that area while Sequoia does not? Should I be alerting Sierra instead of Porterville? More questions than answers. Probably until told differently, I will keep doing what I am doing.

The rest of the afternoon is the normal stuff. We go out of service at 1800 with both Sierra and Porterville. Time for dinner-gnocchi and wine. Also we talk with our children and my brother on our regular Thursday call. Kathy calls and I fill her in on the day. She thinks we did what we were assigned to do with the fire.

The light comes to an end. Sherri is sleeping on the bed and I on the catwalk. We read for a little while before going off to sleep.

The good part about spotting the smoke is that we spotted it. A lot of a lookout’s life is doing exactly that: looking. I have wondered if we would be able to quickly spot a smoke. I think once spotted, it would not be too much to locate it and call it in quickly.

Background

Sling psychrometer. By the way, the name of this little device is called a sling psychrometer. Basically all which it does is to measure the relative humidity in the atmosphere through the use of two thermometers. You then go to a chart which shows the two readings and bingo! You have the RH (relative humidity) levels. This is useful for the fire people because a low RH means that the forest is drying out and that a small spark can easily catch fire.