Val on a Sierra beach. Hard to believe this was just a week ago. Especially since we are facing yet  another evacuation threat, here in Upper Ojai…nearly three weeks after the Day fire started.

Gather ye beauties while ye may…

The perimeter map posted on the useful-if-slow InciWeb site, which tracks big wildfires across the country. We are closest to the little nub of fire to the southwest. It’s about ten miles away and the Santa Ana winds, as forecast, are blowing, although relatively mildly at this point. We have been given a preliminary evacuation order, but bulldozers have cut a line twenty-four feet across all the way from the Topa Topa  mountains northeast of Ojai to Santa Paula canyon, between us and the fire, and that line has been soaked in fire retardant.

A neighbor visited with the firemen standing watch at the top of the hill. "Yep," one said in country-tinged voice, "when that fire gets here we’ll fight it. I got a bottle of water right here."

While on a brief vacation last weekend in the Sierras, the aforementioned Day Fire came charging southwest towards our neck of the woods in Upper Ojai, forcing our daughter to evacuate. Never a dull moment in Southern California!

While I’m trying to put the office back together, and hoping the Santa Ana winds don’t bring the still-burning fire back our way, here’s a calming picture from Mono Creek near Edison Lake, in a lovely area in the Sierras at about 8,000 feet.

Ah, the coming of fall in Southern California. Flakes of ash fall as thickly and softly and white as snow. Clouds of smoke bigger than mountains fill the sky. Orangish sunlight and hazy gray skies last for weeks on end. Thousands of firefighters struggle to contain blazes with flames twenty and thirty feet high. Bulldozers cut lines. Planes and helicopters water-bomb all through the day. Evacuation orders arrive in the dead of night, when the skies are glowing, and the traffic wild.

The Day Fire (so named because it began on Labor Day) continues to burn in the Los Padres National Forest northeast of Ventura County.

It so happens I spent about the last month working intensively on a fire story, to be published tomorrow, so this issue has been on my mind.

The good news is that the Santa Anas are not blowing, so that the fire–although it did close Interstate 5 for a time yesterday–is not a raging monster threatening our area. Today fire crews were able to keep it from advancing down the I-5 corridor, according to the InciWeb site, which reports on wildland fires around the country.

The bad news is that this is a large fire (over 25,000 acres) in extremely rugged terrain, very difficult to bring under control, even when wind is not a factor.

Once, I hear, the Western desert attracted crazy dreamers; prospectors, pioneers, fanatics waving crazy religious tracts, some of whom even claimed to have seen and spoken to Jesus Christ and God the Father.

Now the Southwestern desert attracts developers, and people who dream of a house of their own, even if they can’t afford the glamour and traffic of West L.A. Buyers search for a place of their own, but end up with a million others on identical tracts in the middle of the desert. It’s a recipe for a Didion-esque madness of another sort. I think.

That’s what I see when I look at the the photos of Steve Smith. Back in the l9th century, a handful of people saw the beauty and the freedom in this land. In the 21st century people see that it’s cheap, relatively speaking, and that’s all that matters to them. They probably don’t even see the desert.

As the photographer says:

This photo series provides a portrait of the process of development that is quickly overtaking the desert peripheries of Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Los Angeles. Here in the suburban periphery, the landscape is scraped bare, re-sculpted, sealed, and then covered so as not to erode away. These systems of control prepare the land for habitation and also guard it against the natural forces of the desert environment. These photographs document the interactions and contrasts between this manmade environment and natural elements of the desert ecology that it resists and attempts to control.

An El Nino condition is developing, which will likely bring a good helping of clouds and rain to the West Coast this year…for the third year in a row. This is also breaking up hurricanes that could develop along the Gulf Coast.

It’s worth mentioning that the record-breaking rain Southern California lived through last year was aided by a weak El Nino as well…although a "jet stream on steroids" (as Bill Patzert described it) was a much larger influence.

Here’s a discussion from Jeff Masters’ invaluable Wunderblog:

A trend to El Niño at this time of year is unusual; May or June are the typical months that El Niño starts to develop. While the Climate Prediction Center expects that this will be a weak El Niño, the unusual timing of this event puts us in relatively uncharted territory. Since 1950, only one El Niño has started in the Fall, the El Niño of 1968. This event was an average El Niño, with a peak SST warming in the East Pacific of 1.0º C. For comparison, the warming was 2.3-2.5º C in the record El Niño events of 1997-98 and 1982-83. The unusual timing of the 2006 El Niño event comes on the heels of the unusual timing of the La Niña event that ended in May. The 2006 La Niña started very late–no La Niña of similar magnitude had ever formed in the middle of winter, as this one did. One may legitimately ask if these events might be linked to human-caused climate change. I am concerned that this might be the case, but we don’t have a long enough record of historical El Niño events to know. Up until 1975, La Niña events and El Niño events used to alternate fairly regularly with a period of 2-7 years. Between 1950 and 1976 there were seven El Niño events and seven La Niña events. Since 1976, El Niño events have been approximately twice as frequent as La Niña events, with ten El Niño events and only six La Niñas. Some researchers have speculated that this is due to the effects of global warming causing a new "resonance" in the climate system. If so, this is one way in which global warming may end up causing a decrease in Atlantic hurricane activity over the coming decades, since the increased wind shear over the Atlantic during El Niño events greatly reduces the number and intensity of these storms.