Joshua Tree National Park California Geology Fire 2023 02

Sometimes being interested in public policy, and where your tax dollars go, gets you in trouble. But after decades of sitting in university lectures, database, and troubleshooting work it's just the brain I've been damned with.

 

The Joshua Tree National Park web site, unfortunately, reports a fire in the Geology Tour Road area of the park. As you read this, it may have been 100% extinguished and all of the smoldering stuff has been dug up and put out. (Old firefighting joke: "My, you look so extinguished today.") The fire only affected an area along Geology Tour Road which has been temporarily closed. The rest of the Park is open to visitors. Attendance at the Park looks like it may be slowing a little because the hot weather season is approaching.

 

I managed to snap a snapshot of one of the engines assigned to the fire. ID-BOF-E411 means this is Engine 411 from Boise National Forest in Idaho. Hats off to people who bounce along the Interstate in a Navistar crew cab in order to put out a fire out here in the desert. How did an engine from Idaho get to JTNP? Guess: they may have been temporarily assigned to San Bernardino National Forest or Angeles National Forest and were snagged for this fire. Federal dispatch is very coherent and well-considered but not obvious to us outsiders. There is intense planning and things are done with a focus on efficiency. It's a symphony but the result isn't music.

 

In my yard, and in the Park, the heavy rains this year caused grass to grow. You can see the brown, dry grass in the photo. Our air mass comes from the air basin in Los Angeles area. Some report the grass growth is aided by nitrogen, a fertilizer deposited in the desert by air pollutants. It's a gift sent by coastal urban areas.

 

Thanks to the people who are/were out there digging up smoldering root bundles in the desert sun.

 

It is harder to guess ahead of time how you will be received by those in charge of government documents than to guess what you will find in them. Ahead of time, I had guessed I would be sized up as a suspicious character up to no good: I was alone and peeking into government files and into [the actual site of the fatal] Mann Gulch [fire] itself, which had long since been put out of sight, and was better that way. Although Forest Service Employees, I figured, would always be watching me with a fishy eye when I was around and even more so when I wasn't, there were not nearly as many spies as I expected. They were mostly old-timers, and some of them had worked in the office long enough to know that some funny PR business had gone on at the time of the Mann Gulch fire. Most of the Forest Service employees who had a corner of an eye on me belonged to that element in most PR offices who are never important enough to be trusted with any of the organization's real secrets — they just know genetically that big organizations have shady secrets (that's why they are big). Also genetically they like shady secrets and genetically they like to protect shady secrets but have none of their own. I gather that government organizations almost always have this un-organized minority of Keepers of the Unkempt Secrets, and one of these, I was told, went so far as to write a letter to be read at a meeting of the staff of the regional forester reporting that I was making suspicious visits to Mann Gulch and reportedly and suspiciously arranging to bring back with me to Mann Gulch the two survivors of the fire. According to my source of information, after the letter was read the regional forester went right on with the business at hand as if nothing had interrupted him. And, as far as I know, nothing had.

— Norman Maclean from Young Men and Fire

 

Journalism grade images.

 

Source: 3,600x2,800 16-bit TIF file.

 

Please do not copy this image for any purpose.

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