Fire! Fire! Fire!

Thursday afternoon I drove up along the edge of the Black Hills to Deadwood, where I was supposed to spend a week. It was not to be. I had severely underestimated the needs of a creaky, rotten 41 year old body, especially when placed in a late Victorian building where they were still renovating. I lasted exactly one night before writing a polite note to the house owners and driving on down to Hot Springs to a Motel 6.

A little south of Custer I thought I was driving in to bad weather, as the skies looked cloudy and the temperature was dropping. As I got a little further I discovered that what I had taken for clouds were in fact a forest fire, and that the main road to Hot Springs was closed. As I took another route south, I pretty much drove along the edge of the fire and witnessed fire trucks and helicopters come and go.

There's nothing like watching a helicopter come out of the fog to dip into a small pond right beside you and take off again to make the ole' adrenalin pumping. A little further along the road a whole herd of cattle had broken through the fence and were being rounded up by people on horseback, just like in the old west. I stopped on the roadside to take some pics, but was abruptly hounded on by a cop who yelled "keep moving, keep moving".

As I got a bit away from it all and looked back, I saw huge pillars of smoke rising high into the air, almost like a nuclear detonation. The adrenaline was getting back to normal levels and I began thinking about the people and the properties that might get lost in the fire; all because some slob hadn't bothered to put out his sigarette or something.

I finally arrived at Motel 6 and got to talking to the people at the reception, who asked me about the fire. I answered as best I could, refering to road numbers and places I remembered from the map. One elderly lady reminisced about a huge fire they'd had in the area in 2007, and kept asking me questions. Finally I said "I don't know ma'am, I'm just a Norwegian tourist", at which point she said "oooh, I thought you were local, what with your knowledge of roads and such. And you don't have an accent!". I also got to talking to a family who had been evacuated earlier in the day and were now staying at Motel 6.

Sunday I drove up towards Wind Cave, some way to the north of Hot Springs, but when I'd gone a few miles I saw there were fires all along the horizon. I stopped in at a parking lot, where a ranger was handing out maps and explaining what was closed (Wind Cave) and not. I got to talking to a lady of around 55-60 about the fires and again we chatted for a good five minutes before I told her I was Norwegian. Again I got the same reaction: "But you don't have an accent!".

At the same time, her husband was using the binoculars and pronouncing with great authority about helicopter types and plane models, etc. At first I suspected he was just rambling on, but it turned out he was a US army veteran who'd been very close to getting posted to Norway back in the day. We talked some more and I was strongly advised to go see Coolidge lookout, the second highest point in the Black Hills. I'll post pictures from there when I get to Billings on Wednesday.

As I'm writing this, fires are still ravaging parts of the Black Hills, but as yet not parts inhabited by people, not to any great degree anyway. No one has been killed or injured, thank fuck. The cause of the fires are lightning strikes - they get them some mighty powerful thunderstorms up here in the summer, but usually there;s little rain to accompany them. The whole country has been suffering from heat and dry weather, so this was a question not of if, but when it would burn.

All pics here.

I remember thinking "they're burning MY forest". I loooove the Black Hills.






Fire personell.


Chopper and water bag.


This was on an otherwise completely clear and bright afternoon.


Doing the cowboying on horseback, just like in the old days.




The cop whut harried me off.


Mighty clouds billowing up into the air.