Santiam Fire

 First view of fire...

Will just let the pictures tell the story of our dismay and sadness.....

Detroit

Niagra.... just everything is gone.... all the trees on the other side of the road...

At the rest stop just before Gates,  the rest stop was still there but ALL the house around there and ALL the trees by the river are gone.... just charred, fire must have just roared thru there.. there were many people stooping as always.

Old gas station where the guy made the chainsaw bears.... in Gates

Motel in Gates, that was a residential place...

And amid all the destruction...

there sat this lovely vase...

There were people out  picking up things, going thru belongings, throwing things into a burning pile.... the fire was not still burning there, but they had started burn piles for left over wood, bushes, trees.  Everything was quiet.

And  a sign of hope...

it has been a month, and u can see little shards of grasses are starting to come up, a sign of things to come.

The road crew has been doing a great job!! There was nothing on the road, but you could see where things had gone sideways, trees are stacked, brush piles are many alongside the road. Guard rails are smashed and twisted by presumably trees falling on them. and trees are just charred completely... Not going to show all of the pictures at once as would be way too many... 

We drove to Lyons and then the back road to Gates, to cross the river. many houses willy-nilly burned here and there. capricious as the fire must have been. On the hillsides and further into the mountains that you can see, the fire just took off. look closely at the background in some of the pictures and you can see the burned hills.  Detroit was awful, the shell station next to the bridge, all of the trees along the highway and all of the building, the post office was saved!!!  We drove back into the little community and most all of the houses were gone, one whole block, and along the lake.  ALL the little house alongside the narrow strip between the highway and the lake, lovely lakeside retreats, some very old cabins... all gone....

it even jumped to some of the islands... only burned the very tip of the east end of the park.  Everything was closed of course.  the forest service building was ok.  as were the dams.... but most of the area between the dams was burned....

Some areas worse than others..... i had expected it all to be burned, and there were places/areas that were ok, and there were horribly burned areas, just lost.  Carol and i saw, felt... and this will never be the same in our lifetime.... it will be this way every time we go over to the valley.  They will finish cleaning things up and the fallen trees and bushes will be gone and burned out houses cleaned, maybe new homes erected in the old place..... but never the same as it was.......

Take Care All and God Bless