I had several photos to post, but Verizon sucks tonight. It took me 30 minutes to upload this one photo to the Flickr server. Maybe I'll get the others up tomorrow.

The fire season winds down. We are back to a "low danger" staffing level. I am in a two-week extension. My new "DEROS" is 10/22. I'm a'packin.

I had the Bend Bulletin newspaper out today doing a story on the lookout. The photographer was here for almost six hours. He was a GREAT liberal, so at least three of those hours were talking.

Two very serendipidous things happened while the news photog was out here. First, two women hiked up and asked permission to come up to the lookout. One had staffed the East Butte lookout in 1968, right after she had graduated from college! But that was the old lookout building (the current structure was erected in 1995). The Bulletin guy jumped on this as a core for his story.

The second thing was the light-off of a BIG prescribed burn about six miles south of the lookout. That gave a great fire/smoke backdrop for the photo-essay piece.


Nick plays in the dawn light