Tuesday Tidbits:Updated!

A little more on the Tahoe fire, to get an idea of just how bad, this is Mapquest's aerial image of the area. The fire started just below the bottom center of the picture and grew to the north, pretty much everything to the left of the road almost to the lake has been burned, pretty much the center half of the image in now ash. This was a really nice mountain retreat area and the residents blame the loony environmentalists for blocking fuel reduction programs under the guise of caring for Lake Tahoe, now with a major watershed fried beyond quick recovery the damage will take decades to come back if it can.
A healthy alpine forest is rather open and park like in feel as regular small fires keep undergrowth and flammable duff under control. They are not dense jungles and aren't meant to be, the stringent fire prevention policy of the last half century have caused many of our forests to become grossly overgrown. These alpine forests should have 25-30 mature trees per acre not the 100 that are present currently, you cannot let "nature" take its own course then eliminate fire without cutting and clearing done some other way or the results will be catastrophic as this fire and the recent SoCal, Georgia and Florida fires clearly prove that. True I hate to see stumps and slash piles but I prefer that to piles of ash and the black sullen spires of a dead forest. They have finally quit trying to fight the natural backcountry fires and just let nature take its course as fire is very much a part of nature.
I have seen well managed and ill managed forests following logging roads all over the Sierra, found some surreal camping spots that way, and understand proper land management through a combination of thinning and prescribed burns. Hey bumping along for hours in four wheel drive does have a purpose and benefit and I should mention that my buddy Andy who owns the cabin is certified in Forestry, and the rest are arborists. The next trip up will be to finish and expand the defensible space around the cabin.
Update: The latest from KCRA does not sound good, the winds have picked back up and the blaze jumped a fireline. They do a really good job with local news.

Of about a dozen homes on his street, Neal Cohn's was one of just two that was spared from the flames. He attributed its survival to the fact that he regularly removed fallen pine needles from his property, a practice that is banned and subject to fines by the regional planning agency, which says their removal exposes bare soil and causes erosion, a prime culprit in Lake Tahoe's declining clarity.

Now what are the loonbat environuts going to say about erosion into Tahoe? Its President Bush's fault, wait and see. Here is another Ca blogger's take on the matter.