Two-Heel Drive Fire Coverage Continues
Tom Mangan continues to post interesting stories about the Lick Fire. Today he links to an article about people who have property in the area, and he includes a link to a slide show featuring some very good photographic work by Patrick Tehan.
'Turned the corner' on Lick Fire
Firefighter Blog post an update on the Lick Fire in Coe Park here in the SF Bay area:
Lick Fire Bosses Gain Ground. Lick Fire Incident Commander Bob Whallen, his command team and the 1,900 firefighters assigned to the incident have turned a corner. The weather helped as humidity and winds worked to their favor.
According to the morning report from the incident the fire is at 39,585 acres and is 45% contained. Demobilization of some of the resources begins today…. By Mike. [Firefighter Blog]
Follow the link for the full post, which includes a summary of some interesting facts about the fire: Total area projected to be close to 50,000 acres and total cost of fighting the fire to be about $10 million. Or $4.8 million if you believe SF Gate.
Polar Bears and Climate Change
New York Times:
Warming Is Seen as Wiping Out Most Polar Bears. Shrinking polar ice caps will cause at least two-thirds of the world’s polar bears to disappear by 2050, government scientists reported on Friday. By JOHN M. BRODER and ANDREW C. REVKIN. [NYT > Science]
Not everyone realizes that polar bears live in three environments, almost equally well: land, ice pack, and ocean. Global climate change creates problems for these animals in all three.
From the article:
The scientists concluded that, while the bears were not likely to be driven to extinction, they would be largely relegated to the Arctic archipelago of Canada and spots off the northern Greenland coast, where summer sea ice tends to persist even in warm summers like this one, a shrinking that could be enough to reduce the bear population by two-thirds.
The bears would disappear entirely from Alaska, the study said.
“As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear,” said Steven Amstrup, lead biologist for the survey team.
Tom's Latest
Tom Mangan (Two-Heel Drive) reports that he has a new hike article at the Mercury News:
Latest Hikes column: Butano State Park. Actually, it was posted yesterday:
Some hiker friends of mine visit Butano State Park mainly as excuse to stop off for pie at Duarte’s in Pescadero, a few miles down the road. Duarte’s bakes luscious pies with berries picked from nearby fields, and any excuse to stop in for a slice is valid.
But Butano is worth a visit regardless of your pie-craving proclivities. The park has remarkable biological diversity – six distinct habitats – and an excellent mix of trails: flat walks along shady creeks, rocky hillside passages, hill climbs steep enough to require stairs.
Polar ice cap gone by 2030?
This post at Weather Underground caught my attention since I had just seen a National Geographic program on the mechanism and effects of global warming on polar and glacial ice.
You’ll have to scroll down a bit a the links since the portion of the story referring to this year’s astounding decrease in the polar ice cap follows some other information.
Two excerpts:
None of our computer climate models predicted that such a huge loss in Arctic ice would occur so soon. Up until this year, the prevailing view among climate scientists was that an ice-free Arctic ocean would occur in the 2070-2100 time frame. The official word on climate change, the February 2007 report from the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that without drastic changes in greenhouse gas emissions, Arctic sea ice will “almost entirely” disappear by the end of the century. This projection is now being radically revised. Earlier this year, I blogged about a new study that predicted abrupt losses of Arctic sea ice were possible as early as 2015, and that we could see an ice-free Arctic Ocean as early as 2040. Well, the Arctic Ocean has suffered one of the abrupt losses this study warned about–eight years earlier than this most radical study suggested. It is highly probable that a complete loss of summer Arctic sea ice will occur far earlier than any scientist or computer model predicted. In an interview published yesterday in The Guardian Dr. Mark Serreze, and Arctic ice expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, said: “If you asked me a couple of years ago when the Arctic could lose all of its ice, then I would have said 2100, or 2070 maybe. But now I think that 2030 is a reasonable estimate. It seems that the Arctic is going to be a very different place within our lifetimes, and certainly within our children’s lifetimes.” While natural fluctuations in wind and ocean circulation are partly to blame for this loss of sea ice, human-caused global warming is primarily to blame. In the words of Dr. Serreze: “The rules are starting to change and what’s changing the rules is the input of greenhouse gases. This year puts the exclamation mark on a series of record lows that tell us something is happening.”
And…
One more point–global warming skeptics often criticize using computer model climate predictions as a basis for policy decisions. These models are too uncertain, they say. Well, the uncertainty goes both way–sometimes the models will underestimate climate change. We should have learned this lesson when the ozone hole opened up–another case where the models failed to predict a major climate change. The atmosphere is not the well-behaved, predictable entity the models try to approximate it as. The atmosphere is wild, chaotic, incredibly complex, and prone to sudden unexpected shifts. By pumping large amounts of greenhouse gases into the air, we have destabilized the climate and pushed the atmosphere into a new state it has never been in before. We can expect many more surprises that the models will not predict. Some of these may be pleasant surprises, but I am expecting mostly nasty surprises.
Here is Why it is Smoky in the Bay Area
Satellite photograph of Central California showing smoke plume over the San Francisco Bay Area. September 6, 2007.
You can see the plume over the Bay Area, and you can also see that a good part of it is coming from a fire in the Sierra – not just from our local fire. Weather forecasters say that the “finger of fog” coming up the coast from the south may help clear the air of smoke soon.
From the "What Are They Thinking?" Department
As anyone who is semi-conscious and living in California should know, big chunks of the state are subject to wildfires, especially near the end of summer in September and early October. This is on my mind for several reasons today:
When I got up this morning and walked to the kitchen, the sunlight was streaming in through our east-facing kitchen window. The red sunlight. Make that blood red. The sky is filled with smoke from the Lick fire in Coe Park to the southeast of us.
Today the word is that this huge fire – well over 10,000 acres and still growing – had its origin in “human causes” – now said to be some kind of careless burning at a hunting camp outside the park, perhaps trash burning.
Several years ago at this time of year and in conditions not too different from those of this year (e.g. – the whole state is primed to burn.) I was passed in a grassy area of a local train by a group of equestrians… smoking cigarettes!
This time of year, and this year in particular, it is very important that people take the fire warnings seriously!
Bear Buffet
Tom Stienstra posts a summary of some interesting Yosemite bear facts for fall:
The summer-to-fall transition has started for black bears in Yosemite National Park and elsewhere in the Sierra Nevada. In a two-month eating frenzy, bears will pack on the pounds to prepare for hibernation. Here’s what’s happening with the bears at Yosemite…
I learned at least one new thing from this article. Apparently the bears – who are trying to eat about 20,000 calories per day right now to prepare for winter – make acorns a big part of their diet during the season. I knew that Yosemite black bears are omnivorous, eating berries, insects, and just about anything else they can get into their mouths, but I had no idea they were interested in acorns.
Another interesting fact from the article: while human/bear conflicts do occur on the part (the occasional car break-in, bears being hit by drivers, etc.) it sounds like the number of incidents this year is quite a bit lower than during some of the record-breaking years in the 1990s.
It has actually been quite awhile since I’ve encountered a bear in Yosemite, though I used to see them with some regularity while backpacking there or while car-camping in Tuolumne Meadows. (I was visited – twice – by a bear earlier this summer while camping at Ediza Lake. No harm done since my food was safely stashed in a canister.)
Here We Go: Mount Whitney
(Sorry… couldn’t resist. See the title of my previous post if you want to understand a bit more about how my mind works.)
From the New York Times:
No More Privies, So Hikers Add a Carry-Along. More park stewards in the West are removing outhouses from trails and asking hikers to pack out their own waste. By FELICITY BARRINGER. [NYT > Home Page]
(You may need to sign up for a “free subscription” to read the article. Probably worth it for the lovely photograph of the Whitney trail during thunderstorm weather that sits above the article.)
Excerpt:
So from the granite immensity of Mount Whitney in California to Mount Rainier in Washington to Zion National Park in Utah, a new wilderness ethic is beginning to take hold: You can take it with you. In fact, you must.
If you haven’t already clicked the NY Times link or otherwise figured it out, the article is about “human waste disposal” on Mount Whitney, California’s and the lower 48 states’ highest point and the object of many eastern Sierra pack trips. OK, I’ll say it: “poop bags.”
On my Horseshoe Meadow to Symmes Creek pack trip this summer we passed through the Crabtree Meadow area, through which almost all west side approaches to the summit of Whitney are made. As we left the relatively unpopulated route we arrived on (coming in via New Army and Crabtree passes) and turned north here onto the John Muir Trail we noticed a large plastic tub sitting by the trail marker. (We also noticed a 27-person Sierra Club party arriving, followed by about another 50+ people over the next couple miles of trail, but I digress.) The tub was filled with “WAGbags” – to be used for carrying out what you used to leave behind in a six-inch hole.
I first encountered these “double-sealed sanitation kits” a few years ago on Mt. Shasta, where they have been required on the popular Avalanche Gulch route for some years. The problem on this Shasta route is very real; the most popular “base camp” on this route is Helen Lake. During the best climbing times, the entire Helen Lake site (where you usually cannot actually find a lake) is covered with snow. Climbers must melt snow to obtain drinking and cooking water. Guess what was ending up in the snow? Sometimes in large quantities?
So, the use of “poop bags” was required. I’ll leave a few things to your imagination, but here’s the basic deal. You pick up one or more of them in plastic packages at the trailhead. When nature calls you do your business onto a big sheet of paper, thoughtfully marked with a large target. You toss in a bit of sawdust from the “kit,” fold up the paper (yeah, fun…) and put it into a ziploc bag. You put this inside another plastic bag. Since you believed the people who suggested that this could just be placed in your pack and carried out you try this. Your pack smells like shit. You remove the bag and place it on the outside of your pack. Your pack still smells like shit. You put the whole thing inside another plastic bag or two or three. The smell diminishes but does not disappear. You hope for a head wind… and avoid hiking too close to the person in front of you. You remind yourself that this is keeping your snowmelt drinking water a bit cleaner. You wonder how in heaven’s name anyone will be able to backpack if some misguided bureaucrat ever tries to extend this beyond the few high use areas where it is arguably a necessary evil.
So, what about Mt. Whitney? I don’t like the idea, but having “done Whitney” a couple times I do understand the need for this. And the summit isn’t the only problem. Since I’ve approached Whitney from the west both times, I’m not real familiar with the problems at the semi-urban “trail camp” on the east side, but I can imagine they are real. I base-camped at Guitar Lake before ascending to trail crest and then the summit, and I know that Guitar Lake, despite being located in a lovely alpine setting, is overrun by backpackers on their way to Whitney – and here the value of the “carry it out” approach is probably going to make a difference.
While I understand the reasoning in places like Mt. Whitney, what about trying to regulate this elsewhere in the Sierra? There would be a whole bunch of problems with this. I have to say that in almost 40 years of backpacking I’ve almost never encountered any messes left behind by other backpackers. Most folks to follow good practices: walk a long ways from camp, dig a good hole, stay away from water, cover and disguise the site, and so forth. There are practical issues as well. While carrying a “WAGbag” for a day is something that anyone can put up with, carrying a half dozen of them for a week (or more!) is clearly not going to work – for sanitary and weight reasons. Finally, enforcement would be just about impossible – and, I believe, unnecessary and onerous for everyone.
Dan and Brandon Mitchell. Mt. Whitney Summit, California. August, 2000. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.
For my part, I think I’m done with Mount Whitney – unless I have the opportunity to approach from one of the back-country routes. I’ve been there a couple of times, so I don’t have much to prove by climbing it any more. And, frankly, it isn’t the most spectacular place in the Sierra Nevada. There are many places – many of them not even mountain summits – that have made a far greater impression on me, and I prefer to return to those spots. Without a WAGbag.
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Dan's Outside 
California Wildfire Blogs
Tom Mangan has recently pointed out two interesting sources of insight and information about California wildfires that I would like to share here:
Thanks to Tom at Two-Heel Drive for sharing the links.
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September 6, 2007 Posted by gdanmitchell | Commentary | Comments Off on California Wildfire Blogs