If you were wondering exactly which areas within the Station Fire burn area were burned and which were spared, you can thank NASA for giving us some information.
On November 19th, an unmanned Predator B drone flew over the Station Fire burn area and took detailed images with an Autonomous Modular Scanner. Unfortunately, the picture’s not very pretty.
The red line in this image shows the limit of the fire boundaries. Green is remaining vegetation, and anything that’s purple is burned ground. As you can see, there’s a heck of a lot of purple in there.
Station Fire burn area from space - click for full image
For the full-size image, and other images from the drone’s flight, check out the gallery on the NASA site.
I kind of want to drive up there once those roads open up, but a part of me really doesn’t want to go anywhere near the San Gabriels until at least a few plants have started growing this spring …
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We had a similar situation in San Diego County in 2003. One of our State Parks, Cuyamaca Rancho had, I believe, 90% of its area affected by the fire. I drove through as soon as I could get in. It was jaw dropping. I was used to hiking there fairly often. Now most of the fire-activated plants, mainly ceanothus, have taken over, a lot of grasses and annuals have come in. It’s worth a look. Take some pictures. Watch the progress over the years. See what comes in. The wildflowers should be interesting in spring.
This still makes me sick to my soul. I don’t think I’ll be driving through there for a long, long while. It would be too incredibly heart-wrenching. Truthfully I am stunned that they are reopening it so soon. I was hoping they’d just leave it closed until next spring, to give the landscape and critters some time to adjust before humans descended upon in again.
BTW–it would be nice if someone could figure out how to overlay more landmarks on this map–it’s really hard to tell what’s within the burned area, especially around Chilao and Buckhorn vicinity. I know approximately where these are, but still…
This Predator (named Ikhana) is just a fancy remote control airplane which flies in the atmosphere like any other aircraft. It doesn’t fly too much higher than a commercial jetliner. So this isn’t a single photo from space, but rather many photos stitched together (they call it a photo mosaic) to show the whole area in a single view. The article mentions satellites since that’s how they copied the pictures off Ikhana down to somebody’s comfy office. The purple is artificial just to make it easy to visualize the burn area.
Here’s some more info on Ikhana.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/Features/2007/wildfire_imaging2.html
Linda – I put together a rough KML which you can open with Google Earth. This shows the NASA graphic right on Google Earth so you can see the burn area in relation to the area! It’s not perfect, but helps give a better idea. KML is here:
http://www.adrive.com/public/e7f1319f2e087f46a446453b53308a7e68c096435e5179129aeb1b27d3c620f9.html
Sorry for the cheezy download though – if MH wants to host this instead, that’d be fine by me.
Excellent image thanks for finding it.
I’m surprised they’re opening the highway so soon too, I can’t see it being a commuter route. I had just bought a forest pass in August and was looking forward to getting into hiking and had inadvertently hiked Buckhorn because I had too late a start for Mt. Williamson. It’s such an amazing place, I guess/hope the rebirth will be amazing too.