The unburnt areas have been open since Saturday, it turns out.
This forum page at MTBR.com has a bunch of details from mountain bikers who’ve scouted the place (scroll down to post 246).
Lots of familiar places are off limits for now: Coit and Mississippi Lakes, Poverty Flat, Bear Mountain, Orestimba Wilderness, Pacheco Camp, and Hobbs Road beyond Middle Fork of Coyote Creek (I’m assuming this is the Short Cut.) Also, the new visitors center at Bell Station is closed temporarily.
I feel like a recon hike is mandatory within the next few days.
Lots of burn pix at this guy’s flickr site.
I’m that property owner that posted here before. Since then we’ve been back to our property several times. We have to drive down through Poverty Flats then over Blue Ridge and up Little Long Canyon. I’ve taken tons of pics but I don’t know how to post them anywhere.
The randomness of the burn is amazing. There will be areas of intense burn right next to areas that are hardly touched. One really odd thing is how many of the ridges have “mohawks” of brush on the very top. My father gives one explaination. He was in there during the ’61 fire. He watched flames move uphill so fast that the draft blew out the fire at the top! It left a sheer wall of brush 16′ high at the very top. He described it as if someone cut it with a knife. Really weird.
The good news is our cabin made it through fairly unscathed. Yea! We lost a bridge and our chemical toilet. We sadly lost two fantastic oak trees as well. One was over 21′ in circumfrence. I loved to sit in front of that tree and meditate.. sad. The other oak was right next to the cabin. A little bay tree deflected it’s path as it fell and kept it from flattening our cabin. Believe me we are going to do everything possible to save that bay tree!