Photo by losermike.

“Run…to the hills!” shrieked Iron Maiden in their classic track of the same name [lyrics].

Well, last night I found myself running away from the hills.

In case you haven’t seen the news, Griffith Park — the largest municipal park in the country I believe — caught fire yesterday around 1pm. Since many of you have asked, here’s a quick update on the fire from my perspective.

The park itself is pretty darn close to my home. Here’s a map showing the distance between Griffith Observatory, to which the flames came dangerously close, and Spaceland, a small music venue which is very near my home.

I was at Yahoo! HQ in Sunnyvale yesterday during the day. As I was boarding the plane at 6:45 pm to return home, Molly told me that there was a fire in the park and that I might want to explore alternate routes home.

I landed in Burbank at ~8pm and after seeing the thick smoke billowing from the hills, I decided to take an alt route home. Instead of my normal journey down I-5 to Silverlake, I detoured up to the 210 and over to the 2 South. This route took me to through the La Canada hills which are north of Griffith Park. It gave me an elevated view of the profile of the fire, which was stunningly beautiful (and extremely terrifying). On my whole drive home along the 2 South, the entire sky to the southeast of me was bright orange (sadly, I did not have my camera but from now on will keep an old digital camera in my glovebox).

Photo by seraphimC

I made it home around 8:45. Molly was supposed to be watching the Gilmore Girls finale with her friend Laura (Molly & Laura, sorry to rat you out!). But Molly was by herself on the couch watching the local news. Laura had gone home to make sure that she had power and that her dog was ok. By this time, power was out in parts of neighboring Los Feliz and areas of town that are very close to us were being evacuated.

We had no food in the house and I needed dinner, so we left to go find something. We detoured through the Silverlake hills, first on Apex Street east of the Silverlake resevoir and then near Micheltorena to the west of the resevoir. It was dark by then, and we could literally see bursts of flames shooting up into the air (Mack Reed has video footage).

Photo by ericcastro.

We ended up going to Gelsons Market in Los Feliz — taking us closer to the park. The air there was pretty thick with smoke, and after we made it back to the car I noticed that sizeable pieces of ash had settled on the roof of my car.

With that, we went home to watch a bit more news, sent an update to Twitter, and finally turned in.

This morning on my way to work, I saw one of the tanker helicopters swoop down into Silverlake resevoir, suck up a few thousands of gallons of water through a big tube, and fly off to dump the water on the fire. It looked like a big mosquito. Mack got footage of this too.

I detoured to work back up through the 210.

Good luck to the fire crews and to anyone who had to evacuate last night. We were certainly thinking of you. It was a scary night but it seems that everyone will end up ok, except for Dante’s Peak…one of our favorite hiking spots.

Also, in case you hadn’t noticed from my references above, Blogging.la had wonderful coverage of the whole event. There are also a bunch of photos on Flickr, where I found all of the photos above too.

This entry was posted on May 09th, 2007 and is filed under About Me, Los Angeles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.