CA-29 Clear Lake burn area (#1009)

I was headed up to Clear Lake (the lake) and Clearlake (the town) for two reasons. The main one was that I remembered having visited Clearlake some time in the 1980’s, being surprised at how poor the town was, and wanting to revisit.

The second reason was that there were three very large fires in the Clear Lake area in 2015 that were reported to have resulted in massive levels of destruction, I thought in Clearlake. As I was getting closer to the Clear Lake area, I looked for signs of the fire zones and the damage to the far hills seen here was evidence of one of the fires. But, it turns out none of the fires were actually close to the city of Clearlake or along the shores of the lake. So, one thing I learned was something I should have known – to question what is meant when a fire location is described. Checking after the trip I saw that the three fires were relatively near Clear Lake, but nowhere near the route I was taking.

Unfortunately, just two weeks after taking this picture, there was a massive fire in Lower Lake, which is an area that I went through between this point and getting up to Clearlake.