Tag: bridge fire

Inside the battle to save Mountain High ski resort from a monster California wildfire

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WRIGHTWOOD, Calif. —

It was early in the morning when Ben Smith drove his SUV to the top of Mountain High ski resort and looked south. Miles away and across a valley, he could see the ominous red glow of the Bridge fire amid the dark green pines of the Angeles National Forest.

By Smith’s estimate, the fire wouldn’t reach the resort for at least another day.

Then, the fire exploded.

By 6:30 that evening, the resort’s general manager would be racing east down Highway 2 past the town of Wrightwood as flames closed in on the road from both sides.

Smith had done everything he could to save the resort. He was the last to flee after his staff activated a battery of snow cannons to douse the ski area in water.

Now, there was just one thought running through his head: “Hopefully I make it out of here,” Smith recalled as he leaned against a wooden post at the resort’s Big Pines Lodge recently.

The fact the lodge and most of the nearby resort escaped the hellish firestorm is a testament to the work of Smith’s team and firefighters.

“When I left out of here … I expected to come back to everything gone,” he said.

Now, roughly one month later, tree removal crews and electrical trucks crisscross the property. Mountain High operators are optimistic that the resort will open by Thanksgiving.

“Come wintertime — when the snow comes — you won’t even know there was a fire here,” said Damaris Cand, guest services manager.

The Mount Baldy ski lifts are shrouded in smoke from the Bridge fire in Mount Baldy on Sept. 12.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The Bridge fire began Sunday, Sept. 8, in the early afternoon, 11 miles south of the resort. By Monday, the fire was on Smith’s radar as it slowly inched closer.

On Tuesday, the fire would “explode” — engulfing tens of thousands of acres in a matter of hours, increasing in size tenfold.

At the resort’s staff meeting that early Tuesday morning, the mood was calm. The sky still was clear, and painted with the pinks and oranges of sunrise.

But Smith, who is the vice president and treasurer of the Wrightwood Fire Safe Council, saw potential for calamity, as winds were forecast to pick up.

He directed the team to start placing snowmaking guns strategically along the perimeter of the resort. Some 50 employees — enlisted from a wide range of departments — moved around the resort as the skies grew increasingly dark with smoke.

Trees around Mountain High ski resort were left scorched by the Bridge fire.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

By early afternoon, Smith could no longer see more than 100 feet in front of him. There was no way to directly monitor the fire anymore.

Ash and debris — still on fire — started falling from the sky. At one point, a burning stick about a foot long hit the ground.

Employees started leaving, worried about safety and air quality.

“I got out of here about 2 o’clock, and the sky was black,” said John McColly, vice president of sales and marketing at the resort. “A lot of smoke was being whipped up, and it had this reddish hue to it. … Just for the sake of my lungs, I probably need to get out of here,” he recalled thinking.

Then, around 4:30 p.m., the nightmare scenario that was unfathomable just a few hours earlier became reality. A wall of flames over 300 feet tall by Smith’s estimate crested the ridge, roaring with the sound of a jet engine and blasting the resort with superheated wind and debris.

What had started as cautious fire protection preparations had suddenly became a fight for survival.

Workers at Mountain High ski resort used snow fan guns to battle the flames of the Bridge fire.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

Smith directed staff to evacuate nearby campers. The team started pulling time sheets to make sure every employee was accounted for.

Smith sent another team member racing toward the snowmaking control center to activate the giant water system.

The team had stationed about 100 of their roughly 500 snow guns to defend the resort. While they could start about three quarters of them with the push of a button, the rest had to be turned on by hand.

As the majority of the staff evacuated, Smith and a handful of employees remained and raced around the property activating snow guns.

McColly monitored the fire’s progress via the resort’s live camera feed — which is intended to provide skiers a look at snow and weather conditions. He and countless others who had tuned in via social media beheld the flames with awe as they silhouetted a seemingly doomed ski lift terminal.

Smith had alerted fire crews, whom he knows personally through his role with the fire safety council and past wildfires, but they wouldn’t arrive for hours still.

A Mountain High ski resort crew works on a chairlift recently.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

At multiple points, massive explosions shook the ground, accenting the roar of the fire.

The upper elevations of the resort lost power first. By 5:30 p.m., the base area went dark as well. Without electricity, the water pumps for the snow guns fell silent. Now, the guns were powered only by gravity, which sent water rushing downhill from the 500,000-gallon reservoirs and out the guns’ nozzles.

As the fire burned through telephone poles, phone service went down.

The number of employees left at the resort dwindled to three. Then, two. Then, one: Smith.

At this point — 6:30 p.m. — fire flanked both sides of the resort. Realizing there was nothing left he could do, Smith made his escape.

“I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” he said. “I’ve got a wife and family.”

It wasn’t until night that firefighters were able to get to the scene.

Burnt trees from the Bridge fire dot the landscape in Wrightwood.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

Smith arrived back at Mountain High the next morning to assess the damage and assist firefighters. The fire continued to rage on — still with hundred-foot flames, just not fanned by violent winds.

“I came up through Wrightwood, and before you get up to our East Resort, … you’re like, ‘hey, everything’s gone,’” Smith said. “But then you hit the East Resort and start seeing green trees, and you see buildings, and you’re like, ‘Well, damn, that ain’t so bad.’”

Not only was the majority of the resort standing, but the snowmaking guns were still pouring water onto the edge of the resort.

In all, the resort had one, unessential ski lift damaged, while a few ski patrol and maintenance shacks burned down.

“I’m very proud of my team,” Smith said. “A lot of what’s still standing here is because of them.”

When the resort isn’t a victim of the fires in Angeles National Forest, it frequently provides firefighters with an invaluable operations hub. Its buildings serve as a command center, its parking lot becomes a helipad, and its water reservoirs are essential resupply stations.

“Through the years, through the fires, through the fire safe council — just having the partnerships with all those groups and to be able to have all those contacts at your fingertips is amazing,” said Smith.

It took nearly a month to secure the resort and restore power, allowing the full team of employees to safely return.

By early October, crews worked to repave Highway 2, which was left cracked and scarred from the fire and the efforts to fight it.

A sign in Wrightwood thanks emergency crews in the wake of the Bridge fire.

(Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)

In Wrightwood, residents have adorned the city with homemade signs.

A piece of plywood, fixed to the Wrightwood city line sign, with black spray-painted letters read “Thank you for saving us.” A colorful hand-painted sign with a firetruck cartoon hung next to the fire station. “We [heart sign] you,” it read.

McColly had returned to his office in a historic cabin, which now smelled like wet rags and old cigarettes.

He turned his computer screen to show a season pass special offer for the resort’s 100th anniversary. Customers would receive a special hat and pin commemorating the season. And the resort would donate $25 to the American Red Cross Disaster Relief.

The Red Cross was onsite after the fire, supporting relief efforts, McColly said. Partnering with the Red Cross is a way to say thank you and pass the help forward.

“They were great to work with,” said McColly. “They really helped us out a lot.”

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Noah Haggerty

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October 20, 2024
Opinion: How a California community helped prevent the Bridge fire from destroying their town

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On the evening of Sept. 10, things looked bad for the mountain ski town of Wrightwood in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles. Driven by extreme fire weather, the Bridge fire, which had started on the other side of the mountain range, grew from just a few thousand acres to 34,240 acres that day, and was spreading toward the town. By the next morning, it had reached Wrightwood’s boundaries.

This could have been a catastrophe, like the Camp fire in 2018, which claimed dozens of lives and destroyed thousands of homes in the northern Sierra Nevada town of Paradise. Instead, out of more than 2,000 residences in Wrightwood, 13 were destroyed by the Bridge fire. It’s tragic that homes were lost, yet the fact that more than 99% of residences survived and all of the people were safely evacuated is a significant wildfire success story. What explains it?

In recent years, Wrightwood got very serious about community fire-safety measures. Long before the Bridge fire began, the local Fire Safe Council held educational events, coordinating with multiple agencies and governments. They promoted the importance of simple “home hardening” measures to make homes more fireproof, such as sweeping pine needles and leaves off of roofs and installing modern exterior vents that prevent flaming embers from entering houses. They preached about the effectiveness of “defensible space,” advocating that residents prune grasses, saplings and lower limbs immediately adjacent to their homes. And they created an evacuation plan.

The Bridge fire is still burning, but slowly being brought under control. It’s currently 71% contained, with some zones still under evacuation and evacuation warning. As it threatened Wrightwood, wildland firefighting teams prioritized the kind of direct community protection the town had been preparing its residents for, rather than focusing on remote wildland areas, and trying to stop a wind-driven fire that could not realistically be stopped.

They found that most homes in the town had defensible space, thanks to pruning done by owners. Firefighters concentrated aerial drops of fire retardant and water adjacent to the community, to keep the fire from entering the town. And they helped people evacuate, following the plan the townspeople had made.

Wrightwood’s success in keeping most of its homes safe demonstrates that focusing directly on at-risk communities, rather than on forest management activities out in the wildlands, is a significant way to protect towns from wildfires. We have seen the grim results of logging vast areas of remote forest under the guise of “thinning” and telling communities that these zones would act as fuel breaks, preventing wildfires from reaching towns. Paradise, Greenville (destroyed in the Dixie fire in 2021) and Grizzly Flats, which is still rebuilding after two-thirds of it was lost to the Caldor fire that same year, are all examples of the fallacy of this approach.

Yet there are those who would ignore examples like Wrightwood and want to double down on the failed strategies of the past. The most dangerous current example is the deceptively named Fix Our Forests Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.). If passed it would roll back bedrock environmental laws and allow for clear-cutting — taking out most or all trees in an area — and logging of mature and old-growth trees on federal public lands. The bill is wrong on the science.

While certain forest management practices, such as controlled burns and prescribed natural fires, are important wildfire management tools, there is growing consensus among ecologists and climate scientists that “thinning” and other logging activities do not curb wildfires and more often tend to intensify their behavior and effects. Some of the Forest Service’s own scientists are now criticizing their agency for the failures of the old approach, noting its ineffectiveness and urging a direct focus on community protection. Other Forest Service scientists are reporting that denser forests tend to burn less intensely in wildfires because of their shadier and cooler microclimate, while “thinned forests have more open conditions, which are associated with higher temperatures, lower relative humidity, higher wind speeds, and increasing fire intensity.”

We cannot afford to go backward and stubbornly repeat costly mistakes, as the Fix Our Forests Act would do. Vulnerable communities need officials to take heed of examples like Wrightwood and begin prioritizing community wildfire safety over logging industry profits.

Chad Hanson is a wildfire scientist with the John Muir Project of Earth Island Institute and the author of “Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate.”

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Chad Hanson

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September 23, 2024
Fire threatens Southern California ski resorts. Will they make it to winter?

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A number of Southern California’s most popular ski resorts are under threat from wildfires that are burning across the mountains that skiers glide down.

At the Mountain High Resort in Wrightwood, staff desperate to save the popular skiing spot turned on snowmakers to keep flames from the Bridge fire at bay.

The fire, which has charred 49,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest, exploded in size late Tuesday, burning homes and sending flames barreling through the trees toward Mountain High’s chairlifts. Despite the harrowing visuals captured on the resort’s cameras, all the main lifts and buildings survived with “little to no damage,” the resort wrote on social media Wednesday.

“Thank you to all the employees and fire fighters for their hard work. Our hearts go out to the Wrightwood families that may be suffering. We are with you!” the resort wrote in the post.

Ski resorts in the Big Bear region, meanwhile, were hoping to remain standing as the Line fire raged nearby, putting the mountain community on edge. The blaze, which started last week, has already charred more than 34,000 acres and was 14% contained Wednesday.

Crews were staging equipment on the hills at Snow Summit and Bear Mountain and trying to create defense perimeters around buildings, chairlifts and other improvements, resort spokesman Justin Kanton said as he sat in his office on the property, socked in by smoke.

At Snow Valley in Running Springs, which was closest to the fire’s front line, workers were using snowmaking guns to saturate the grounds in an attempt to keep embers from taking hold, Kanton said.

The resorts have suspended operations until further notice.

A nine-year resident of Sugarloaf, just south of Big Bear City, Kanton, 44, said he enjoys the bountiful nature and the varied weather. But he says he’s seen large fires encroaching on the peaceful community with increasing frequency.

“It’s one of the few places in Southern California where we actually get four true seasons,” he said. “Unfortunately it looks like, more and more, we’re starting to have a fifth season, which is fire season.”

Big Bear Mountain Resort, which operates the Snow Summit, Bear Mountain and Snow Valley resorts, reported its snowiest February on the mountain since at least 2000. The snowy winter, which helped plants grow, was followed by a hot and low-rainfall summer, which dried them out.

As Kanton sat in his office Wednesday, he watched as ash particles rained down from the sky. Usually, he can see across to the north shore of Big Bear Lake from his window, but on this day his view was obscured by haze. The west end of town was under an evacuation order, and the rest was told to prepare to evacuate if conditions worsened.

Kanton said he was prepared to leave town if needed and would probably head to Palm Springs to stay with friends. There’s currently just one way out — down winding Highway 18 into Lucerne Valley — so he hopes, if it comes to that, people will be patient and not panic.

“These things can escalate pretty quickly, especially given the weather conditions we’ve had,” he said.

Big Bear Lake City Manager Erik Sund is hopeful the fires that have burned in the valley in recent years, including the Radford fire in 2022, will help mitigate the current blaze by cutting down on available fuel for the flames.

He’s still concerned about the damage to roads, though, given that all routes in and out of town have been shut down except for Highway 18. In addition to creating a potential choke point in an emergency, the closures hamper residents who commute to work and tourists who want to take advantage of Big Bear’s hiking trails and other attractions.

“After this fire gets behind us, the next thing we’ll be doing is assessing all of those things,” he said. “Because before you know it, it’ll be winter, and we’ll want to welcome visitors.”

Times staff writer Hannah Fry contributed to this report

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Alex Wigglesworth, Summer Lin

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September 11, 2024
Bridge fire swept through Mountain High, but famed ski resort largely survived

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As the Bridge fire swept through mountain communities Tuesday night, Mountain High’s webcam showed a dramatic scene: Flames cutting through ski lifts at the well-known ski resort.

The images boded ill for Mountain High, but as the night wore on, the resort’s fate remained a mystery.

With sunrise, it became clear that the resort largely survived the blaze.

“Fire raced through the area yesterday, but all the main lifts and buildings survived with little to no damage,” according to a post from Mountain High. “Thank you to all the employees and fire fighters for their hard work. Our hearts go out to the Wrightwood families that may be suffering. We are with you!”

Some homes were burned in nearby Wrightwood, but exact numbers were unavailable Wednesday morning.

Located about 75 miles northeast of L.A., Mountain High has three mountains for skiers and boarders, an ice rink for skaters and Yeti’s Snowplay, which includes tubing and sledding for young ones.

The Bridge fire broke out Sunday in Angeles National Forest, with the flames spreading rapidly Tuesday in the northeast area, forest officials reported.

Between Tuesday and early Wednesday, the blaze exploded from 4,000 acres to 47,904 acres, growing more than 10 times in size.

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Summer Lin

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September 11, 2024
Bridge fire in Angeles National Forest grows to 200 acres; visitors are evacuated

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Angeles National Forest visitors were being evacuated Sunday as a wildfire broke out north of Glendora in Los Angeles County.

Dubbed the Bridge fire, the blaze had quickly grown to 200 acres as of 6 p.m. Sunday, according to Dana Dierkes, public affairs officer for the Angeles National Forest.

Forest officials said firefighters were performing an “aggressive attack with air and ground resources.” As crews labored, the temperature hit 105 degrees in nearby Glendora.

Dierkes told The Times it was “likely a very busy day” in the forest “given the high temperatures. Visitors come to find relief from the heat in the waters of the San Gabriel River.” Cars parked along forest roads can block firefighters as they try to get to the location of a wildfire, Dierkes noted.

The cause of the fire, which was 0% contained Sunday evening, was under investigation.

Several roads were closed, including State Route 39, East Fork Road, Glendora Mountain Road and Glendora Ridge Road.

Meanwhile, the fight continued against the Line fire in San Bernardino County. The wildfire had caused mandatory evacuations in multiple mountain communities and was threatening more than 35,000 structures.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday declared a state of emergency due to the rapidly expanding blaze.

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Ryan Fonseca, Amy Hubbard

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September 8, 2024