Life in Lynch Lair at Wildcat Station

[King Bob]

I think they spit too. Keep your distance.

[Drunk Monk]

There's a BTS story that Arnie actually punched this camel because he was pissed off because the camel kept spitting on him and biting at him. If memory serves, Conan got in some trouble for animal abuse, but it was back when that was just becoming a consideration.

[Greg]

My house sits on what used to be the old stage coach corridor between the train station in Raymond and Yosemite. People would travel via train from San Francisco, get off in Raymond and then take a 12 hour stage trip to the Wawona Hotel. There used to seven or eight stops along the way between Raymond and Wawona where the stages would swap out their teams of horses. All remnants of those stops is long gone. Kind of sort of. The hidden cemetery, for instance, is located at what used to be the town of Grub Gulch.

The closest stop to the Lair was the Summit House. About two mile from my house there used to be big boarding house complete with water tower of which there is nothing. Again, sort of. There is eight foot tall metal water tank by the side of the road where I thought the house might have been.

Yesterday, I checked on Google to see if I could see any of the foundations of the buildings to get a better sense where the Summit House was located. I couldn't. But I did see that you could do a ground level 360º view of that area. I was amused by this. I thought they reserved the street level view for the big cities. But I zoomed and much to my surprise the street level view was taken so long ago you could still the old wooden water from the Summit House. It just goes to show how long ago some of those pictures were taken.

[Greg]

Visual Representation.....

[King Bob]

If they have street view for places up in the hills, we can finally locate those albinos.

[Greg]

I guess we celebrate holidays with our neighbors, sort of. Beau Brechbuehl and two of his friends came over yesterday to wish me Happy Father's Day. That's a first time I've been wished Happy Father's Day for obvious reasons. But I appreciated the sentiment none the less.

[Drunk Monk]

That's odd. Is Beau et.al. a dad? 

Every Father's Day, I exchange a lot of texts, messages and even a DOOM post here, with fellow dads. It's an amusing ritual where we swap greetings, well wishes and check in. 

Here's the gif I sent out this year:

[Greg]

Nope. Beau is the oldest child. I believe he is 10.

[Drunk Monk]

Ah okay. I didn't realize he was a kid. 

That's cute.

[Greg]

Yep. It's kind of a game of tag. tQ and I started by dropping off a bunch of Halloween Candy the year before because Halloween was cancelled. We felt bad for the kid so we dropped off candy for the neighbors.....

[Drunk Monk]

Tempted to cut&paste the email update you sent me Greg (omitting the intimate Bear Bro stuff - NOT WHAT YOU THINK SFYetiBear!) 

From out of the frying pan, into the wildfire...

[Greg]

I'll still working on Yosemite Photos. I'll do the update here in a bit.

[Greg]

Happy Fire Season! Said no one ever.

On the way back from Oakhurst, where tQ and I had gone to our first in person movie in over 14 months, we noticed a plume of smoke to the Northwest of the house. The plume didn't concern me greatly because it was in the direction of the Grupe Ranch where CalFire practices fighting fires. As a matter of fact, CalFire had just done a practice fire at Grupe just a couple of weeks ago. It just seemed odd they would practice putting out a fire on the hottest day of the year. At 3pm, the temperature at the Lair was 111º

Turns out it wasn't a practice fire. It was a real fire. What started off as a 50 acre fire at 3pm, became a 4500 acre fire with 0% containment by 8pm. All sorts of Flying Fire Fighting kept flying over the house as they went back and forth from Eastman Reservoir. The fog of an emergency set in. We didn't know if we were supposed to evacuate or not. We were getting various conflicting reports. Supposedly the street next to us was told to evacuate but we couldn't confirm. But we slowly started to think about what we wanted to put in the car.

There was no way for us to get all the cats. At best, I figured on at least 7 of the cats going into the carriers. The dogs would be fine. Our neighbors popped over to see if we needed help. Reese had already gone towards the fire to help a neighbor pull out his horses in a trailer. Reese, who has 3 cows, wasn't going to be able to catch his cows if the fire swept through our area.

Fortunately the wind blew from our house toward the fire. The main fire was east of us and ran from North to South. tQ pulled up a map that showed the fire burned about 3 miles from the Lair. But looking from my drone, it seemed to be farther away from us than that. At 8:30, we decided we were safe enough to go to bed, which we did.

This morning, the fire still burns and the air is full of smoke all around the house. I think they were up to 5% containment.

In irony news, a house up the road, that we seriously considered buying because it had 70 acres of land but didn't because the house was so poor might have been consumed by the fire.

[thatguy]

We had 2 CalFire planes flying low over our house on Sunday. Circling…I didn’t see any smoke, so I thought perhaps they were doing some kind of demo for Laguna Seca which was hosting a big motorcycle event (we also saw a slow moving plane towing an enormous sign for the event)

…but no, it was a fire very nearby. They most have taken care of it quickly as there was next to no news coverage. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/mcrfd/status/...9404849154


Be safe out there!

—tg

[Greg]

We can now see flames as we look from the back porch. There is a line of smoke that wasn't there last night. I saw several giant plumes of black smoke that usually indicates structures burning.

1:20pm Monday.