an Diego suffered tremendous wildfire damage during the California autumn fires of 2003.  The community that my mom and dad live in was entirely evacuated for three days, and several dozen houses in the area burned down, but the firefighters managed to save the rest, and kept the fire from taking out any houses other than a few on the edges of canyons and areas filled with wild brush.

Since I had moved up to the Bay Area several months before the fire, my only contact with it was seeing photos on the news and talking to my parents about the inconvenience of it all. I was curious to see the damage though, since huge swathes of land near their homes were entirely leveled,  including all of Mission Trails Park, the place I used to ride my mountain bike all the time.

The photos on this page were taken in and around Mission Trails park in December 2003, when I returned to San Diego for an after Christmas visit.  The fires had burned out months before, but there had been virtually no rain in the intervening months, which meant the hills were just about as black and dead as they were back in August.

All of these photos were taken on a very sunny and warm day in late December, and the bright sunlight washed out the colors and depth of blackness in most of the images.  I'm not very happy with how the photos look, since they often fail to capture just how starkly black the hills and ground were.  Besides, if you don't know how thickly covered all of the hills were with 8 and 10 foot deep chaparral and small trees before the fire, you might figure they're always bare rock and dirt, and just wonder why it's that odd black color in these pictures.

The photos on this page are organized into several sections, showing numerous views of various areas.  I've inserted the best few shots from each, and included links to many others.  Also, most of the photos on this page are thumbnails (large ones) and can be clicked if you want to see much larger, higher quality images of the same scene.  I recommend it; most of the big views are impressive, and the detail and scale of things is hard to see in an image that's just 500 pixels wide.

• You can see some shots of Mission Trails Park, pre-fire, on the appropriate photo page.

These first two shots show the same valley.  This one is looking across a road to the right, and the next one is off to the left.  You can't see how black the hills were in these photos, but it was a very surprising contrast in reality.  The oddest thing was how the houses on top of the ridge were not burned at all, and how the flames just ended so suddenly a bit further to the right.  I was standing on a wide, 4-lane road for these shots, with a grassy strip on the shoulder on both sides and hundreds more condo units behind me, where there was no fire damage at all.

The little trail of greenery down this hill is new, all regrown since the fire from sprinkler run off.  Ordinarily these hills would be entirely covered in chaparral, with no ground visible at all.  They'll be green as Ireland come February or March, when the San Diego rainy season has been going for a couple of months.

This stretch of canyon runs up between two large blocks of homes, and amazingly enough there weren't any lost in those blocks, despite the entire canyon between them being burned up.  The fire got across the road to the hillside of a church, but it was put out there, and the firefighters put it out once it got into these trees, or they'd all be gone as well.  The tips of some were still green, way up high.

A sideways view of the trees you see in the shot above. The ground was entirely black, darker than the asphault of the road, and all of the underbrush was gone.  You can see how the bark of the eucalyptus trees was scorched, but only up about a dozen feet.

• A look down this hillside.

I liked these trees for the tips.  The ground below them was entirely blackened and all of the underbrush was dead, but the trees were still alive, months after the fires, and as you can see the flames moved on so quickly that the tops of the taller trees survived untouched. The green leaves here are perhaps 40-50 feet up.

• Click this to see a house that used to be here.

The next few shots are of this hillside.  As you can see it's right in the middle of a huge area of condos, none of which were burned (except for some way up on the outer edge of the complex, mostly over to the far left and right, way out of the view of this photo).

The flames came through a very narrow swath of native vegetation, perhaps 10 feet wide, that ran along a hillside from probably a quarter mile to the left.  None of the houses or yards on either side of it were burned, since they were all protected by grassy lawns, and the flames moved along so quickly that they ate up all the dry brush in a minute, and then burned out before they could heat up other greenery enough to catch fire.  It was very odd to see this ebony hillside, covered in gnarled, charcoaled bits of trees and branches, two feet from lush green lawns and untouched houses.

A closer look at what's left of the larger chaparral bushes when the fire is through with them.

• The same tree from a distance, with more hillside perspective.

Looking at the hillside from the right, with some of the blackest of ground visible.  The run that the fire came along is visible in the background, marked by the scorched trees.  Funny how green and untouched that one on the right is, when it was so near the ones that burned. At some point some city department with chainsaws is going to have a lot of work to do, cutting down all of the dead trees before they fall on houses or cars.

A closer look at the hillside and the perfectly black piles of dead chaparral. It looks like someone threw buckets of paint at the ground when you see these stretches of blackness, amidst the usual gray and brown and green. 

• An even closer look at the hillside.

This is across the street, where the fire jumped after consuming the hillside by the parking lot.  The flames were put out a bit further down to the right, at least partially due to the hillside growing much less vegetated.

Fire Marshall Flux surveys the damage firsthand.

These shots are from Mission Trails park.  The first batch are all taken from the back parking area at the end of Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.  This one looks up the hill to the left at the end of that street.  Click this to see it larger; it's a very nice shot.

Here's a shot from the dirt parking lot at the end of Clairemont Mesa, over to the right of the bridge. Ordinarily you couldn't see any of the ground here since it would all be vanished in deep chaparral.  These trails are simply not visible from here, other than the one going straight up the hillside.  These are great for hardcore mountain biking as well; short and super steep going down, and nearly impossible to power up, even in your lowest gear.

• Another big canyon shot.

Click this shot to see it full size; the large version is pretty impressively dead. 

I took a bunch of photos of this bridge, which used to be traveled (by foot and by bike) hundreds of times a day. It's been closed since the fire, for reasons that will soon become obvious. It's not very high or long, but it does get you across a very large and relatively steep canyon, and leads to the main nexus of several busy walking/biking trails.

• Another bridge view from the right side.

Here you see why the bridge is closed.  Despite the canyon floor being 30-60 feet below it, the flames were high enough and hot enough to set parts of it on fire.  You can skirt or leap or walk over the I-beams to get across, but it's probably not a real good idea.  Especially since the fire did unknown damage to the steel of it, and its entirely possible that the whole thing could collapse under the weight of foot traffic.  They had the near side of it blocked off with yellow warning tape, but were mostly relying on common sense to keep people off of it.  I imagine the deer and coyotes and such just walk through the canyon below, when they own this area at night. 

A look at the major burned section, courtesy of my camera's digital zoom lens.

• Bridge burned close up.
• Another larger close up.

Here's the last shot of the bridge, taken from way up on a hill on the other side of the area. Click this to see it full size; it's a nice panoramic view.

I was standing at the left edge in the previous photos.

Okay, I lied, there's one last bridge photo.  But only because I liked the burned out sign post with the "pick up your dog's shit" warning on it.

What can I say; the partially charcoaled railroad ties fascinate me.

This one is cute.  The top six inches or so burned off before they put it out, but it burned down in a groove, so the chain that used to go through a drilled hole is now just lying on top of it.  Hey, it works.

These shots were taken from the midst of the burned out area, far over to the right of the bridge.  The odd thing about these is that with the deep chaparral gone, for the first time ever, you can see what a fricking dump this area near the road is. All of these mogul-like piles of rubble and sprawls of broken cement blocks were never visible before, and I certainly had no idea they were here, despite having been through this area regularly since I was in about 8th grade, when I used to come up here and ride my dirt bike with school friends.

• Quite a lovely area, eh?
• More broken hunks of blocks, up on a hillside.

Looking down at the area near the road, which looks like a mogul field, except for being perfectly flat land.   There were all sorts of other dumped objects in the burned fields, though I'm sure most of the things people have thrown away up there were long since eroded away or burned up.  All that remained were large metal things, most of which were rusted with age; old water heaters, large appliances, etc.  I half expected to see a car or two, but no such luck.

• More burned hillsides.

Another shot of Fire Marshall Flux in action.  I'm here mostly to give you an idea of the size of these burned trees.  They were toxically black also; I rubbed against one small limb while walking and had a charcoal streak across the shin of my jeans.

You can also see that the weather was quite warm, and my long sleeved shirt is gone.  This is December 28th weather in San Diego, it was probably 75 and cloudless, and we were hot just walking around.  If I'd been jogging or riding a bike I'd have been in shorts and shirtless and pouring sweat.

I eventually had to get some sun and cool down, as you see in this self portrait. I have no idea what my expression here is saying; I look constipated.

A view up the trial you see behind me in the previous photo.  It's pretty damn steep, though rather level.  A good biking workout; starts off easy, but by the time you're about to where my dad is in this photo you're struggling to keep going at all. And you've got several hundred yards yet ahead of you, all uphill, once the path curves around to the right.

• Zoomed view of dad.

Here's a look down the hill back towards the road.  The mogul field is over to the left.  Click this to see the large verison, and you can see that those little dots in the middle are actually people, a couple and their two kids, who were running all over the hillside and having a great time getting their shoes very dirty.

If you've never been to this area or walked trails similar to them, you can't really imagine how weird it was to see all of the hills wide open and clear of vegetation. There's just always been this totally impassable (lacking a chainsaw) chaparral that's more than head height and very tough, dry, half-dead wood.  You literally can not get through if it you're anything larger than a rabbit.

Here's a father and son walking, with their big dog.  The St. Bernard was panting fiercely as it trudged along in the hot weather.

The dead plants, or mostly dead ones, seemed very sad to me.  Cactus are so tough and can grow in almost anything, from inferno heat to freezing cold, and with about a drop of water a year.  But they can't live through fire.

This one might survive; it was on a flat area that wasn't densely-forested, so the flames must have passed over it in just a minute or two.  Not long enough to scorch the whole succulent mass of it.

I liked this dead yucca.  Burned, but not so completely as to be reduced to ash, it's finished.  But behind it the plant lives on, as this fresh shoot comes up from the root, breaking through the blackened soil. 

These last few shots are views off to the east, across the burned out hills.  Click this one for the large view; it's my personal favorite of the shots on this page.

You can't really tell there's fire damage here; the hills just look like they are covered in black and brown dirt.  But this hillside was incinerated; the whole thing used to be covered in brush as thick as you see in the canyon to the bottom and the trail on the hill was invisible from this angle.

Another long view off to the northeast. Click to see it full sized.

I like the way the ground in the foreground slopes so steeply down to the right.  It gives you a good idea of how rocky and harsh the soil is here; forget farming in this area, even if you did have a supply of water. The snaking trails off into the distance are nice also.

Those two tall towers are a bit of a mystery.  There are pairs of them all over the hills, but no one seems to know why they are there or what their purpose is.  They're about 30 feet high, hollow, and you can hear the wind blowing through them and whilsting out the top, but there aren't any entrances on them.  Just ladders up the sides, which are blocked off at the bottom but accessible if you're willing to jump and nimble/strong enough to climb over the obstructing barriers. I was such a person back in high school, and climbed up them a couple of times, in that stupid, "I'm a teenaged boy, what could go wrong?" mentality.

On top they have nothing, just a thick metal grill and are solid metal inside, down a few feet below the grill.

I've long thought that perhaps they're fire towers; built to give refuge to people out here if they get stuck and have a fire coming towards them.  Ironic, eh? I'm not at all sure of that conclusion though; what's the point of a fire refuge that's so hard to get up onto and that offers no protection from the deadly heat and choking smoke that would rise from the flames?

Lastly we have two photos that my dad asked me to take.  We got up to the top of a near hill, and this is the view west, to the Pacific Ocean.  It's about 15 miles straight from Tierrasanta, and we were up there on a very clear day.  Most of the glare and haze in this one is due to the sunshine in the camera lens; we could see more clearly than you can in the photo, even after I've tweaked the layers and brightness.

The long stretch of land to the left is the Mexican coast, and the islands are south of the border as well. They're now uninhabited and a nature refuge, after serving as a gambling, whoring, and drinking paradise back in the early days of San Diego, during prohibition.

Downtown San Diego is visible here to the right.  There aren't any real tall buildings, mostly since the old and insufficient airport is right on the harbor and the approach path for incoming aircraft takes them straight over downtown; so close to the tops of buildings that nervous flyers (and high rise workers) close their eyes and hope for the best.

I had always heard that a PSA plane clipped a building and crashed downtown back in the 70's, killing about 150 people, but now that I look it up online the actual story is that the PSA jet ignored tower warnings and ran into the rear of a small Cessna, crashing in North Park and killing all 135 passengers on the jet, both guys in the Cessna, and seven people on the ground.

But hey, no one has hit a building downtown since, and there's no reason you should let any of this dissuade you from visiting beautiful San Diego, where it's sunny and 80º (or 90º) pretty damn near all year round. (Though that sort of monotonously hot weather is a major reason I was so glad to leave the city, when the opportunity to go north to the Bay Area beckoned.)

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.