Earlier this week another wildfire broke out near us. This one is known as the San Antonio Fire. It’s located in the San San Rafael Valley near San Antonio Canyon. That’s a region just North of the Mexican border. It’s probably 15 – 20 miles from us in Sonoita.
As of mid-week, the fire had burned about 3000 acres. Today, with the wind whipping up, the fire seems to be spreading. There is a layer of smoke from the fire that is passing over Sonoita. The air has the distinct smell of freshly burned wood. It’s as if everyone in the area was having a fire in their fireplace. The fire is burning mostly oak and grass.
With the extremely dry winter that we had, it is going to be a doozy of a fire season for us. I guess one can’t knock it though as we don’t have to deal with hurricanes, tornados or earthquakes. Tomorrow, we will likely get outside and make sure we have all the brush and potential fire fuels cleared a good distance from the house in preparation for the fire season.
Sean’s baseball game never happened today as the opposing team didn’t show up. So, I guess that makes them 9 – 0 now.
Wow…Sean’s team is so good that people are afraid to show up!
I hope the fires stay away from you guys…..when I lived in Satellite Beach, FL, we had to deal with the fires. I remember stepping out into 95+ degree heat and smelling the thick smoke……smelled like waking up at a campground and sticking your face in the embers of the previous night’s fire.
When I was there, they evacuated an entire county because of the fires. I volunteered with the Red Cross and ended up delivering food/drink to the front line firefighters. It was a little eery driving down an abandoned county road at night after the fire had already gone through…..the woods still stood on either side of the road, but there was thick fog/smoke everywhere and the forest floor was still aglow with burning embers. We managed to alert the firefighters to a flare up and saved an evacuated house (as well as several animals the evacuees had left chained up behind..including a couple of friendly Rotweilers). Our story ended up getting written about in the AF Base newspaper. It was kind of interesting.
We’ve never had to evacuate though flames have been quite visible. We don’t live in a forest per se. Those fires tend to be at higher elevations.
Excellent analogy of the smell… The winds died down over night, so not as smelly or smokey today…
Last week we had a lot of smoke and even ashes over St. Pete from the fires in Georgia and northern Florida. Not a lot of fun.
I saw about those fires… they were big… we get one of those in AZ about every other year… never been one that close to us though the one in the Santa Rita Mts a couple years back was very visible to us…