Black Mountain

This morning, I woke up very early (before the sun came up!) to meet up with a group to hike Black Mountain.

Outside the front door

With Pam and Kevin! :)

Lookout tower at the top of Black Mountain, used for spotting smoke and fire in the surrounding wilderness.

This little guy comes up to the lookout tower with his owner, a U.S. Forest Service Volunteer Fire Lookout, when he's voluteering!

With Chris! :)

This is an Osborne, used by fire lookouts to determine the directional bearing of smoke in order to alert fire crews to wildfires. This technology has been in use since 1915 and is composed of a topographic map of the area surrounding the lookout tower, with the lookout tower at the center of the map. The fire lookout moves the sights until he/she can look through the nearer sight and view the crosshairs in the further sight aligned with the smoke or fire. The location is noted and fire crews are alerted. The Osborne is also used to observe approximate locations of lightning strikes, which are then passed over by air crews who check for smoke or fire emanating from the lightning strike. 

These are some dates and notations written on the Osborne at Black Mountain.

Weird.

Many of the folks in our group. And Chris's backpack.

Heading down

In the end, we had hiked a little over 8 miles and gained around 2,800ft of elevation

After the hike, Chris and I drove through an area that had been hit pretty hard by wildfires only a few weeks earlier.

Remnants of trees and limbs cut down by fire crews attempting to control the blaze that came through here.

You can see the green area down there, beyond all the burned up stuff, that escaped the fire.

We drove to Morongo Casino and ate at the buffet there. I wanted to play roulette but they only had video roulette and I was like, "Hell no," so we went to Chris's house…

…and I learned to play chess. (I am so bad at chess.)