If you can't stand the heat.

Every year the interior of Alaska burns a little more. People from outside the area might not know it, but a smokey sky and a fiery horizon is an annual occurrence around the Fairbanks area. We had some particularly bad fires in August of '09. I'll post a video of I took while driving down Airport road around 5PM.

We had our first big fire in the area on Friday. It was about a mile away from my buddy Daniel's House. The News Miner had this to say about the fire:

Hot, dry and windy weather stoked Alaska's first large wildfire of the season from a quarter-acre blaze north of Fairbanks on Friday afternoon to more than 700 acres of burning hillside by Saturday, fire officials said. The Moose Mountain Fire ignited near the well-populated Goldstream area, but it was burning away from residential areas on Saturday, according to the Division of Forestry.

I got a text from Daniel with a picture of the column of smoke and we had the following exchange:

I was driving the Limousine at the time and I was all the way across town at the corner of Farmer's Loop and the Steese Highway. You could tell there was at least a tree or two on fire based on the plume of smoke:


I drove over there as soon as I was done driving my clients home from the Airport, but by the time I made it to the Goldstream valley the tide had turned on this fire. The wind was strong and out of the west for most of the day. I'd estimate it was gusting up to 15-20 miles per hour for most of the afternoon, but by around 7 or 8 PM the wind died down all together. It slowed the fire quite a bit and allowed the planes to dump it into submission. We didn't have to evacuate, but we did have a couple of Jack and Cokes and watched the firefighters do their jobs.

Here's a video of one of the Firebombers doing a flyby. (Mist, if you are reading this can you please tell me what I'm looking at and correct my airplane ignorance. I've probably gotten something wrong!) I'll also post some pictures I took in august of '09 when I saw these planes at the airport.