so here's a wild story. a few days ago a fire started that they called the three rivers fire - out at the base of sierra blanca, in wild virtually uninhabited country. it grew quickly - 6,000, then 8,000, then 12,000 acres. everyone was alarmed.

but here are a few facts about that wild scrubby dry desert country. first, it's on the way to oscuro, a place where you turn off the road to go to the trinity site. so this is in the mild nowheres where they figured dropping a bomb would be ok, maybe seventy years ago. but sierra blanca, being a single mountain that towers over us all, is a kind of symbol of the area. we see it rise above the other mountains and into the sky. these days, a lot of smoke out there.

there was, it turns out, a campground out there. maybe it was one of those nomadland type places. there are some poeple who love the desert, and love getting away, way away, from everone. and it was so dry you could start a fire just thinking thoughts, let alone lighting cigarettes.

but then, all these firefighters out there trying to figure out how to contain it, and what happens but a big old storm comes in and dumps about six inches of snow on the mountains. now out there, it probably wasn't that much, maybe just a steady drizzle. but what they got, helped the firefighters. that fire didn't grow any more.

we had a power outage due to that four to six inches, and had a wild day getting snow off the tent and the cat trailer, and getting the generator going. the mountain thing to do is to say, well we really needed the moisture, and that's real true. but school was canceled, kids were home, and there was no power, so it was a pretty wild day.

school is about to wrap up for the semester, and kids are trying to finish make-up work, etc., so this whole weather deal put a crimp in their plans. but i'm all about staying home at every opportunity. the last place i want to be is some muddy gravel road with six inches of fresh snow, and a steep cliff on the side.

the other good thing that happened to that fire, was that it came up against the 2012 burn scar. apparently the eastern part of sierra blanca got it in 2012. and got it real bad. people up there will never forget that huge fire. one time i was at this place, the flying j ranch, and the lead singer got into witnessing. not so much for jesus, although you knew which side he was on, but more just telling the straight-up honest truth to this huge audience of cowboy music fans myself included. and what he said was, he'd never forget 2012, because the mountains he'd grown up with, that he'd taken for granted all those years, lost all those trees in just one fire. and it would just never be the same again.

three rivers is a remote outpost way out on the road to oscuro. i always think of trois rivieres, a major city in quebec, when i go through there, but really it has only one building, the only stop for about eighty miles in either direction. i sometimes think it's ironic - that they would name anything after a "river" or "rivers" when there is so little water out here, or that it would share its name in a way with quebec's major city. but it's just a place, with a lot of wild desert brush all around it.

and that's the news. hope it's the only fire in the area this season, as the snow has kind of soaked everything, and we're good for at least a week, probably.