Angeles Crest Highway After the Station Fire

This is a video of the drive that Hal McAlister, Director of the Mt. Wilson Observatory, and his wife Susan, took to reach Mt. Wilson after the fire. Words that are being used to describe the Angeles National Forest along the Angeles Crest Highway are: utter desolation, a moonscape, and a landscape in an ashen gray winter.

I have gone skiing, hiking, and camping in this forest and now it's all gone. It will take decades for it to regenerate back to the way it looked the last time I was there. That will not happen in my lifetime.

The Mt. Wilson Solar TowerCam

The Mt. Wilson TowerCam is working again. I'm not sure what direction it is oriented; it looks like it might be facing towards the northeast. There is still some smoke, but there is also some blue sky. Best of all, the threat to Mt. Wilson is much less than in my previous post. Enjoy the view!

The Hills Are Burning

My home city is Los Angeles, CA and I am not at all happy about the fire that is going on in the Angeles National Forest. As I post this, 21,000 acres have burned and thousands of homes are threatened. I could rant about the wisdom (or lack of it) in building homes on the hillsides, but I won't. I could rant about the lack of a controlled burn program in the Angeles National Forest (ANF), but I won't.

Mt. Wilson is a mountain in the ANF at an elevation of 5,700 ft. From the top, you can see most of the Los Angeles metropolitan area to the Pacific Ocean and Catalina Island. The Mt. Wilson Observatory has a 150 ft. solar tower with a TowerCam. The link is here. The fire is getting very close to Mt. Wilson, so I'm not sure how much longer this TowerCam will be operational. It is kind of interesting to look at.