Thursday, July 3, 2025
Smoldering Root fire on mt. Shasta?
My wife was supposed to meet her friend in the city of Mt. Shasta but her friend is a Spiritual Guide for people from all over the world who make pilgrimages to Mt. Shasta as a Sacred Mountain sort of like "The Mt. Kailash" of California. (Kailash is a historical Sacred Mountain to people in India, Nepal, and Tibet for around 10,000 years or more).
So, the meeting today with her friend had to be canceled because her friend found a smoldering root fire on Mt. Shasta in a sacred Area of the Mountain so she needed to wait for a fire engine to deal with the smoldering root fire.
The reason I'm writing about this is if you are in the area of mt. Shasta and hiking and see anything unusual smoke wise anywhere we have had hundreds of lightning strikes here in the past couple of days so it might be important to catch all these smoldering root lightning caused fires that can travel underground and come up days, weeks or months later and become a real fire sometimes.
Years ago I lived up here and had been swimming with my family in Castle lake (likely in August when it is warm enough at 6000 feet to do this). And I had my old 82 GMC Window van and I had an empty bucket and shovel on board and saw a lightning strike make a fire just below Castle lake while driving down the paved road there. So, I got my bucket of water filled at the lake and hiked down to the fire to try to put it out with my shovel and bucket of water and waited until a Forest Service fire engine showed up to relieve me then.
What had happened was the lightning had hit a tall pine or fir tree and traveled down the tree and took all the bark off the tree in a spiral like a barber pole and then set a log nearby on fire. So, since the vertical tree wasn't on fire but the log next to it was I tried my best to try to put out this fire with limited success. At least I could prevent it from spreading any further until the Forest Service Fire Crew showed up next to me and relieved me at this point so I could take my family back into town where we lived then.
So, if you are up in this area after all the hundreds of lightning strikes in the past few days here and smell smoke make sure it's a campfire and not a lightning strike gone bad into a fire or smoldering roots of a tree or bush.
So, if we all work together we can keep a big fire away from this area this year.
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