With smoke drifting all the way to Lake Tahoe, the massive Rim Fire rumbled into Yosemite National Park on Friday, threatening to burn thousands of homes and disrupt vacation plans across the Sierra Nevada.
The Tuolumne County fire nearly doubled in size overnight into Friday, and by evening it stretched over about 125,620 acres, or 196 square miles — larger than the size of San Jose. It was just a few hundred acres short of becoming the 15th-largest wildfire in California recorded history, dating back to 1932, and was expected to grow this weekend, Cal Fire officials said.
Smoke from the Yosemite blaze combined with the mostly contained, 2-week-old, 20,000-acre American Fire smoldering in a forest west of Lake Tahoe, dispersing ash and dirty air over the Tahoe-Reno area. The fires cast a pall on three of the most popular vacation destinations for Bay Area residents looking for one last summer getaway.
“I think about the people out there doing the rough camping that are miles away from their car. That’s got to be scary.” said Pleasanton resident Shelby McNamara, who just returned from the fire area.
Yosemite, oddly enough, was perhaps the least affected, as the vast majority of the park remained open, and the wind blew the smoke away from tourist destinations at the center of the park. By contrast, officials declared the air quality unhealthy in the Reno area, more than 100 miles north of the Rim Fire.
Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said although about 2,700 firefighters were working on the Rim Fire, it’s been a struggle to safely access the rugged canyon terrain, and the extremely dry conditions have helped the fire spread quickly.
“And now the fire has grown to a size and intensity where it’s creating its own wind and weather,” Berlant said. As of Friday evening, it was only 5 percent contained, but that was up from 2 percent earlier in the day.
Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman said 11,000 acres of wilderness in the park was burning. But he noted that was a mere fraction of the park, which people from around the world book reservations for up to a year in advance.
“There are certainly people who backpack there (in the area burning), but it’s over 20 miles from Yosemite Valley, Half Dome and a lot of visitor attractions,” Gediman said. “There’s no reason people should cancel their trips.”
The cause of the Rim Fire remains under investigation, though Berlant said: “When it’s this dry out, it doesn’t take much.”
One firefighter was injured and 16 structures were destroyed; 4,500 more homes were threatened. Authorities advised more evacuations for the small nearby towns.
McNamara, who has a second home west of Yosemite, near Groveland, decided not to venture up this weekend and become dangerous “looky-loos” in the firefighters’ way.
“I told my husband, ‘Do we really want to go up there?’ And he said, ‘Why? What are we going to do, sit on our deck and watch it burn?'” said McNamara, president of the Danville Area Chamber of Commerce.
The couple went this week to get some of their belongings and saw residents having picnics and watching the fire, and they watched the flames rage for a bit themselves.
“Everything was covered in ash. It was creepy,” she said.
While McNamara and many others will stay home, Harvey Correia was taking his Antioch Boy Scout troop to the southern half of Yosemite for a planned weekend outing.
“I was more concerned with concerned parents. They were saying, ‘I heard they closed the park,'” said Correia. He calmly sent them photos from the Yosemite Facebook page showing clear blue skies and maps from Cal Fire showing the fire was 30 miles away from their camp site. Eventually, the families for all 15 boys agreed the fire was mostly just a scary thought and went along.
The troop is planning an 8½-mile hike from Glacier Point to Yosemite Valley. Correia and other assistant Scout masters hoped to teach the boys how to make a campfire — if it’s allowed — and cook with a camp stove: “We’re looking for a good time,” he said.
Danville resident Kathy Till and her husband, who took friends from the United Kingdom to Yosemite last weekend when the fire sparked, came back Monday and had no idea the fire would grow at the rate it did. They might head back this weekend to help friends collect some furniture that has sentimental value.
“I know furniture doesn’t come first,” Till said. “They wouldn’t go up if it was dangerous.”
The fire crossed over into the western edge of Yosemite on Friday morning, and a section of Highway 120 from the Bay Area toward the park remains closed. A few camp sites and the Hetch Hetchy area were closed, while some outdoor activities and festivals in the Yosemite area, including the Strawberry Music Festival, were called off.
Friday night, Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco, which is 150 miles away from the fire but had to shut down two of three hydroelectric plants in the area that serve the city.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, owner of the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power System, which supplies water to 2.6 million Bay Area residents and businesses, re-iterated Friday that water quality and delivery were not affected.
But officials were monitoring the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir inside Yosemite as the fire moved a couple of miles from the water supply. The level of particles in the water was measured as 0.2 on a scale in which 5.0 is considered contaminated.
Brown on Thursday declared a state of emergency for Tuolumne County to free up resources as 11 major fires burn throughout California, tying up more than 8,000 firefighters. California wildfires had, until this week, burned half the amount of land as they did at this point both last year and on average over the past five years.
Contact Mike Rosenberg at 408-920-5705. Follow him at Twitter.com/RosenbergMerc.
