Hardwear Sessions

This weekend, dry lightning ignited a swarm of wildfires in Northern California. By Monday morning, Cal Fire (the California agency responsible for tracking and fighting wildfires) counted approximately 90 small fires in Mendocino county, and another 75 in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. (View Calfire's map of current, active wildfires.)

Fires burned closer to home, in Napa County, in Santa Cruz (the third devastating wildfire in recent weeks), and in Brisbane, a small city south of San Francisco.

Last night, we drove up into the Berkeley hills and sat near the top of Grizzly Peak, "just because." (We were also out on a hunt for banana cream pie, but that's irrelevant.) From Grizzly Peak, we could see an enormous plume of smoke rising from the peninsula. It was the smoke from the Brisbane fire.

By Monday morning, the Brisbane fire had been contained, and firefighters reported that their containment efforts, aided by cooler weather (and the return of the Bay Area's usual summer fog), were beginning to rein in the Napa and Santa Cruz fires.

As of this moment, the air is still hazy with smoke, a reminder of fire's undeniable place in the California landscape. It is not a pleasant experience. The particulates cloud the air, sting the eyes, and settle in the throat. As global warming continues and Northern California's climate grows hotter and drier, scientists expect more wildfires in our region.