 |
| Sherri talking with a visitor |
I woke up early, real early and could not get back to sleep. Evidently, Sherri was awake even before I.But we stayed in bed. I until 5:30; Sherri more like 6. Since we are just going up for the day, there is not much to put into the car. We are loaded up and ready to go. The car leaves at 0710. We are taking Steven’s car as ours is still in the shop. With Fresno projected to be at 107 degrees, his air conditioning will serve us well.
The trip up is uneventful. Sherri is able to sleep some on the way up. We stop at the Visitor Center to use their bathrooms. Then up to Panoramic Point and the service road into Park Ridge Lookout. We get in about 0905. I make a couple of trips up to the lookout cab and get us situated.
 |
| Gary mingling with the Hot Shots |
We fall into the rhythm of doing our scans and making sure all is right in the lookout. We hear the weather and staffing. And then again. And again. We find out that the reason why they repeat it is that Sequoia National Forest has three Districts, each with their own repeater tones. With the radio issues Porterville has been having, they do the general announcements once for each District. We are just high enough we hear everything,
While today we will not spot any smoke, we kept busy. Shortly after 1000, we start getting visitors. And then more visitors. 26 of them in all. We get visitors from all over: from Columbia, Spain, Germany and the Czechia. Always interesting seeing them and hearing their experiences and why they would spend three hours walking to our lookout. This is a great gig.
But there were two groups of particularly interesting people. The second group was a couple of couples. The men were all excited about coming up-this was their seventh lookout. They had come from Buck Rock and were thinking about going to Delilah. We talked until the women came up the road. They all enjoyed being up here.
The other group was two women
and two children from Germany. This was their first time in a fire
lookout and were all questions about what they were seeing.
Particularly a large ground animal below us. It was our first
spotting of a marmot this season. We spent about 20 minutes with
them. They left content.
Later on I started hearing voices. The usual direction is from the north, coming up the road. I kept looking and seeing nothing. The strange thing was these voices were coming from the west, not the north. Pretty soon there were two men who came into view, charging up the steep slope. One of them carrying a pulaski, sort of like a firefighters pickaxe. When they came into the tower, we found out they are from the Arrowhead Hotshots. The two of them had been deployed to Canada to fight their fires and had returned a few days ago. They felt that they needed some to get them back into firefighting shape. So instead of coming up a trail, they started going up the Azalea Trail, like I did Friday, but then when they met up with the powerline, following it straight up the side of the ridge. Wow! That is amazing. I had thought a time or two of going down this, but to go up it takes a lot of body strength. I guess that is what it takes to be a HotShot! They are interested in what a fire lookout does. We explain things like the Osborne FireFinder and how we use it and how we look out for smokes and lightning. We hear on the radio that there is a medical emergency down at Big Stump, the Mark Twain Stump specifically. So our Arrowhead friends hurry off to see if they can help.
There were many more visitors.. Some as late as 1730. We greeted all of them and enjoyed their company. We are on until 1900 with Porterville, but go out of service with Ash Mountain Fire at 1800. In between, we get on our family’s Zoom meeting. We continue that for a while, even as we start driving away. But we end the time as we start losing signal. It was for the most part an uneventful day. But I am glad we have been up there. We made it home a little before 2100.
Background
Call Sequence. This has been a year of change for us. In respect, they are small changes. But change always leads to anxiety. Each of our radio channels are assigned certain frequencies. When we normally talk to Porterville, we use channel 3. This year we got changed to channel 4. No big deal. But because we have a wide area, full of valleys and canyons, there is equipment which relay our signal on. Each of these repeaters have its own “signal” or tone which it recognizes. So now we say to get Sequoia National Forests attention is to say Porterville Park Ridge Channel 4 Tone 12. Like I said, not a biggie, just a change to get used to.
Animals
No comments:
Post a Comment