Today, Hwy. 138 will be closed, from 7:00 AM through 4:00 PM, from Top Town Crestline (at Crest Forest Drive) to the Crestline Bridge (at Hwy. 18). You can either wait for it to reopen (please don’t), or just go around, with your most likely detour being Hwy. 18 through The Narrows.
And, while it does not affect visibility, smoke is in the air. Probably trapped by some inversion layer effect, the smoke seems to top out at around 4000 feet, but from there and down, you’ll smell it and probably even feel your eyes sting a little bit. This is drift smoke, from far away… well, if Corona is far away. Of course, smoke from a thousand fires makes up California’s atmosphere right now, so you could be inhaling particles from all over California.
Just as a matter of trivia: Fire size is typically reported in “acres.” However, who the hell knows how big an acre is? We know miles, and maybe we even know kilometers, if we are delicate, Continental- types who know and love the metric system (also known as the, “Dewey Decimal System”). But acres? Nobody has ever driven for an acre, or seen a sign limiting you to 35 Acres Per Hour. We don’t know how much an acre weighs, or how many acres are in a gallon.
The answer: An acre is a chain by a furlong. You are welcome!
Okay, I know… it’s easy to forget that a “chain” is 66 feet, and a “furlong” is 660 feet…. OBVIOUSLY, about 2/5 of a hectare!
I know… all of these farmer- sounding words (note: An “acre” was originally defined as how much land a team of oxen could plow in one day) might not be language that us non- agrarian types speak. There’s got to be a better explanation! And, there is: “Acres” can be directly translated into “square miles!” Every square mile— which is equivalent to a square that is one mile on each side— has exactly 640 acres in it. Want to visualize a square mile that isn’t a perfect square? Lake Arrowhead— the water, not the community— is about 1-and- 1/4 square mile in size.
A football field is a little over an acre in area… that’s one that most of us can visualize. In fact, I don’t see a reason why us red- blooded ‘Muricans shouldn’t simply switch over to measuring property and land area in “Football Fields,” with their good ol’ non- metric “yards” and “hash marks” and “quarters” and even “bootlegs.”
So… a fire that is 6400 acres is equivalent to a swath one mile wide, by ten miles long (or vice versa, depending on your perspective: Remember the old joke about the pilot who made the most terrifying landing of his entire life, because the runway was so ridiculously short? He just BARELY stopped before the end of the runway, before noticing how WIDE the runway was… ).
The Holy Fire, which started yesterday, in Orange and Riverside Counties, was last reported at 4000 acres… a little over six square miles. The Carr Fire in Redding was last reported at 160,000 acres… 250 square miles. However, they’ve quit measuring the Twin Fires in Mendocino in acres… they’ve been reporting that monster in square miles already: 440 of them. Yes, SQUARE MILES. Figure that any way you want to: Equivalent to 10 miles wide, by 44 miles long… or a half- mile wide by the length of the State of California. Another “perspective” tool: the City of San Bernardino is 62 square miles… the Twin Fires have taken out the equivalent of SEVEN San Bernardinos.
Sorry about sneak- attacking you with a math lesson today… come for the road report, have flashbacks from third period of seventh grade. But, while we couldn’t fathom how long THAT class was— a feet to survive on a daily basis— at least today’s lecture didn’t last furlong. I hope it didn’t give you a head acre. Heck… tares worse ways to learn what size these fires are!