Sorry I haven't been around but life has been crazy in the past 24 hours. There is a major brush fire that broke out at around 2 am Sunday morning close to where I board my horse and I've been helping out with potential evacuation of horses and livestock. A friend of mine called me up at about 4 am with the news and by the time I got to the stables, it had burned to about a mile of the stables with strong Santa Ana winds fanning the blaze. You couldn't miss the flames and it looked like hell was on its way. We were also lept busy crusing around the property looking for stray embers and putting them out with shovels and dirt. Thank god the wind reversed direction or it would have been all over very fast.
Basically, if it looked like we were going to get overrun, we would have released the horses into the wash and let them work their way out. I actually saddled up Max and had him ready for a quick getaway if things went bad (which they can with a brush fire). Fortunately, with the wind reversed and multiple strikes by helicopter water drops (they were literaly flying overhead and dropping it almost on top of us), the fire was largerly suppresed until the winds whipped it up again and it began to burn away from us. It's still going but they'll knock it down if the winds don't get too bad.
Also, while the one approach is burned out, there's still several others that could go and endanger everything. I'm glad that I microchipped Max the week before. October has always been the worst time of year for this sort of thing and this one is no exception. Well, I guess we won't have to worry about clearing brush on some of the trails... Now to get some sleep and pray that nothing else happens.
Here's a picture of the affected area- four hours before this picture was taken, the hills were a blazing inferno.
