Central-West to Northern part of Unit 27 is charred. I know unit 1 is north of 27 and that area is affected as well. I hunted 27 2 years ago. Short term at least, this is very sad. Alpine is a great town, Hannigan Meadows was a beautiful area. Just very sad with every update I hear on the news.
its over 300K acres and still ripping. I fight fire up in Utah but I have a buddy off my engine on the fire right now with a hand crew. Basically, its doin work and not showing signs of stopping.
Yes a very sad situation me and my family actually were evacuated for 10 days. it started in the bear wallow wilderness and burned north and got a good chunk of unit 27 and burned into unit 1 and burned up 95% of unit one. I was born and raised here in unit one and its a sad situation very depressing to see it happening in your back yard. but it was a ticking time bomb. when they shut down logging and shut down the mill in town my grandpa who was a welder at the mill told me that the day would come that instead of us falling asleep to the sound the chipper we would fall asleep to the sound of helicopters and tankers fighting to save our town from burning up. It was only a matter of time. Its sad to say but for all the residents here that spend a lot of time in those mountains, nobody was suprised and everybody knew once it got going that it wouldnt stop until we got rain or it ran out of fuel. It is now over 500,000 acres and still growing. it is 38% contained and that is only because in certain areas it finally did run out of fuel.
sad but true, thats the way it is everywhere out west, no logging means more fires and hotter ones. My firefighting unit is down there with two tankers(water tenders) one just got moved to the southern half which is the most active.
Fire is the natural order of things and while there is destruction and chaos now, the years to come will show another side to mother nature and it will be magnificent! The game populations will get stronger and everyone will take benefit most of all, the wildlife...
IMO Smokey the bear is a joke here in California... Preventing forrest fires is no way to manage a resource.
Ya Cali is definitly in need of better management from the forest service. I asked a FS guy one time how hard it was to get a controled burn going. He said the had to draw up a plan (stack of papers) and then have that passed by a committee! I said sweet, I'll get a match
Has anyone got a report of how the archery elk season was in Unit 1 this year? Was there any descent hunting after the fire? I have 13 points as a non-resident and I am thinking seriously of using them in 2012 for an archery elk tag.
Went with some buddies that had the tag. I live in unit 1. Give this unit a few years and its going to explode with huge bulls. Saw some monsters this year but with a few year that burn is going to produce some giants. The archery hunt started far to early this year and the rut a little slow and now just picking up for the rifle hunt. In a whole bunch of places where they had thinned the forest the fire did a lot of good burning all the under growth and blow downs. I cant wait for another tag. Ive lived here all my life and only had 2 elk tags and only one in unit 1 and it was an archery hunt in November but as u can see in my avatar if u do ur homework u can kill a monster on any hunt in this unit.
Shane: Thanks for the good info. I am really trying to sort out whether to draw next year or hold out a year or two longer. Nice predicament to be in...
Umpqua Hunter, you can go to the Arizona Dept. of Game and Fish's website, AZGFD.gov, and see the results of previous hunting seasons. They also put out a very nice book with all sorts of data that is great.