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Bobcat Fire Flyover Video

DavidHarris

Well Known Member
My son and I flew over the burn zone of the Bobcat Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles Sunday morning. I'm revising a hiking guidebook called Trails of the Angeles, and a third of the trails in the book are now in the closure zone for at least a year and a half during recovery from the fire. We went up to inspect how the trails were impacted.

My son set up the GoPro and capture a video, played back at 4x speed.

https://youtu.be/BAN5zGYCB8s

You can see the burn was most severe around where it started in the West Fork of the San Gabriel River, up into the San Gabriel Wilderness below Mt. Williamson, over Burkhart Saddle down to the Devil's Punchbowl, on the south side of Monrovia Peak, and in the Big Santa Anita Canyon drainage. The fire generally stopped when it reached the perimeter of the 2009 Station Fire, or burned in patchy bits. The fire was also patchy up in the forested high country. It's incredible how the firefighters must have worked to battle this fire in such rugged terrain. Although the fire was huge, it looks like it will have fewer long-term effects on trails than the Station Fire because of the areas that it burned and the patchy behavior in the high country.

The angle of the camera and the video speedup makes it look like we came close to some ridges. We were not as close as it might appear, and were quite conscious of our position and our energy management and the possibility of downdrafts. There is still a TFR over the Mt. Wilson area so we stayed above 8000' out there. It looks like there's nothing making smoke any more, but Southern California has experienced some severe second fires when winds rekindled smoldering vegetation from a previous fire.

David Harris
 
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