2024 Sequoia Fire Adventure
What to do when you finish a 13 mile hike with 4,200 vertical feet… (what we wanted to do was take a nap!)
We arrived in Big Arroyo Campground at about 5pm and we found a burned area that was smoking. What is this evil?
We think some campers built a campfire near the water on top of ground roots. They put it out at night, but when they woke up it had come back to life, grown and spread. We think they tried again to put it out the next morning and scattered the burning logs away from the fire area. We arrived and it was again alive and continuing to spread. We must have put on 40 or so gallons of water on the area and dug a perimeter using tiny shovels.
This is what the area looked like as we started putting water on the hot coals. The whole area was red hot and steam came up as water went down.
Alexandria and Pat used poop shovels to dig around the full perimeter and we added water. It was not enough, but would hold until professionals arrived. Jerry was in charge of communication.
After our work.
We used InReach SOS feature. Here is the communication with Garmin as we started the process. Not long after, we began speaking with Seki-fire directly. That communication is on the right column.
About 30 minutes after we started the SOS we received a direct communication from the Seki-Fire folks. They have real helicopters and authority!!
And at about 9am we saw the helicopter fly in to do the final mop-up..
