Fire!

It's fire season in Arizona! Woke up this morning to a house that smelled like a campfire. There's a fire burning about 30 miles south of here and the entire area is engulfed in smoke. For those of you who have been here, you'll understand when I say the smoke is so dense that I can't see any of the mountains around us. No Thumb Butte, no Granite Mountain, nothing. Behind our house I can see only to the next ridge, nothing beyond that! 

We're in that period just before the annual rainy season when everything is bone dry. Many fires are started by storms that have enough energy to produce thunder and lightening but don't have enough moisture to actually rain. However, our local fire was started by a stupid camper/hiker who got separated from his buddies and decided to light a "signal fire" in an area where all fires outside designated campgrounds are prohibited. According to the linked article from the local paper (click on title for link), we now have a 500 acre fire burning. As one of the commenters suggests perhaps we need a stupid camper law to penalize people who do really dumb things like this. (Arizona has a "stupid driver law" that charges people who drive around barriers across flooded streets for their rescue. Since we have so little rain, there are many places where instead of building a bridge the road go down and across the river beds. When we do have rain those low spots flood. There's always some idiot who's in a hurry and tries to drive through the water even though the roadways blocked--hence the name "stupid driver.")

7/1/08 Update: Here's an update complete with map and photos.

7/3/08 Update: As of this morning the fire has grown to over 9000 acres. Here's the latest report.