Peaceful Sunset...

This was the view looking west from Lyons Peak just a few minutes ago. Serene, beautiful, peaceful...

And not necessarily expected. Up until a few hours ago, the national weather service was forecasting a mild Santa Ana for today and early tomorrow – enough to cause the Governator to order a full alert for all the fire-fighting services, and to pre-position equipment in San Diego County (and in other Southern California areas).

But in the end, we got no winds today. It was dry, warm, and calm – a very pleasant day, actually.

This is one time when I'm quite happy that the weatherman got it wrong!

Cross-Posting???

I seem to have confused some of my readers with the little note I put at the bottom of one of my posts this morning, saying Cross-Posted from Jamul Fire Help – several of you wrote to ask me what the heck that meant. So let me explain in a little more detail…

The folks who run the Jamul Fire Help website were kind enough to ask me to post on their blog occasionally. They're trying to raise money (and otherwise help) for the Jamul victims of the recent fires. They asked if I'd help out a little by posting on their blog, and of course I agreed. When the topic makes sense for both my blog and theirs, I'll publish the same post in both places – that's what “cross-posting”…

Tomato Soup...

Just before the fires last week, my parents shipped two large boxes of New Jersey tomatoes to me – the last of the season. When the fires closed the Post Office (and we were evacuated), the delivery that should have been made last Tuesday or Wednesday was delayed until this Tuesday – an entire week late.

My mother was sure that the content of the boxes would have putrified by then, but when Debbie picked up the boxes, she discovered that most of the tomatoes were fine. In fact, most of them weren't even completely ripe yet. So I set them aside for a few days to let them fully ripen. The few that ripened earliest disappeared into a few evening snacks of tomato salads and tomato sandwiches. Lovely things, they were.

But they don't hold a candle to what I did with the remaining 16 dead-ripe New Jersey tomatoes today: I made a large batch of Boston-style cream of tomato soup. Debbie, our best friend Jim, and I gorged ourselves with two gigantic bowls of this delectable concoction; it was our dinner tonight. The recipe was simple enough – I'd never made this particular style before, but there wasn't much that could go wrong. The base of the soup is a puree of the tomatoes (with some carrots and onions) and a little whipping cream for texture and body. The tomato flavor is enhanced with a strong component of fresh thyme, plus parsely and fresh-ground pepper. The result was right up there with the very best tomato soups I've ever had.

I made about six quarts of soup; there is only about a pint left. All three of us are sloshing as we walk. But we have smiles on our faces…that soup was good enough to make us wonder if it might not be a controlled substance!

Preparing for the Next One...

One thing we can be certain of, unfortunately, is that wildfires will attack our community again. Some areas (such as Lawson Valley, where I live) have 35 years or more of chaparral fuel build-up. While a fire can start almost anywhere, areas with large amounts of fuel upwind of them have the highest risks during a Santa Ana – any fire upwind of such areas will move quickly toward them.

The general direction of the Santa Ana winds is from the northeast (blowing toward the southwest). However, local geological features (hills, canyons, etc.) can modify this, so the direction could be different in your immediate neighborhood – and those same features can also affect the intensity of the winds. The Pine Valley canyon is a good example of a geological feature that intensifies the wind; the I-8 bridge there is notorious for its fierce crosswinds during a Santa Ana.

It can be very instructive to see how much fuel is left near your home, and especially to the northeast of your home. The map at right, above (click to expand it) shows the fire history in our area for the past 18 years, since 1990. The blue hatched areas are where the Harris Fire burned last week. The pink hatched areas are where fires burned since 2000. The green hatched areas show fires that occurred in the 1990s. The areas that have no hatching (plain gray) have had no fires since 1990.

You’ll note that some areas have burned multiple times – it only takes a few years after a fire for enough fuel to regrow to be able to sustain a fire. However, fires in those more recently-burned areas are much less intense, for the simple reason there is less fuel there. In general, the longer it has been since an area has burned, the more difficult it is to fight a fire there. From the perspective of future risk, it’s definitely better to have recently burned areas upwind of you.

If you examine the map carefully, you’ll note that there’s a large area unburned since 1990 stretching from roughly the Descanso area southwest to the town of Jamul. Those of us living in that area should recognize the risk we face from fires starting during a Santa Ana, especially severe Santa Anas such as the one we had last week. There is a mild Santa Ana forecast for tomorrow and Sunday; even this elevates our risk considerably. If you live in this area that hasn’t been burned for a long time, be especially watchful this weekend and during any other Santa Anas we have.

An excellent resource that allows anyone in our area to watch for fires are the cameras on Lyons Peak. These are operated by HPWREN, and they update every two minutes. You can get the raw feeds directly from this page, or get them processed (with location annotations and automatic updating) from this page. Either way, keeping an eye on these cameras will give you the earliest possible warning of any fires breaking out, and exactly where they are located.

Cross-posted from Jamul Fire Help…

Monster Caterpillar...

As I was watering our potted patio plants this morning, I noticed that our potato tree (Solanum paraguayensis) had lost quite a few leaves. I looked a little closer, and spotted this enormous green caterpillar on its sparse branches. It was still early, just after sunrise, and cold – so the caterpillar was motionless. All stretched out, it would be about 3 inches (8 cm) long; about the size of one of my fingers.

With a little research on the web, I'm pretty sure that this is the caterpillar of some Sphinx moth (there are many species). I grabbed this photos quickly, as I suspected that when it warmed up it would start moving about.

And that's exactly what it did – by the time I got these photos loaded into my computer, the temperature had risen substantially, and the caterpillar had turned into an amazing eating machine. I watched it methodically strip one small branch of my poor potato tree in about 60 seconds. I don't think anything would have been left of my potato tree after a few hours of work by this guy!

So I picked it up and moved it over to the 6' post that holds our bird feeders up, and hoped it would feed a family of birds for a few days. A couple hours later, it was still there, wandering about looking for something green to masticate. A couple of sparrows were perched nearby, checking it out – so I suspect it's life expectancy is quite low…