Pine Valley after the fire...

 This morning Paul and I both woke up too early and knew we weren't going to get back to sleep.  We decided to go up and hike through the campground area at Pine Valley to see what's left after the fire.  We had gone up for a picnic dinner the other night, but didn't have time then.  We hiked about 8 miles total.  You can't drive your car in so we had to hike from the pay booth basically.  We started by hiking up the road to see how the picnic site we use for our Memorial Day picnic each year faired.  Not too good...pretty much all of the trees around there got badly burned.  There is some spottiness to the burned areas, but the end of the campground nearest town seems to have taken the brunt of it.  Lots of the rest of the it is pretty much fine.  No structures in the campground area are ruined, but a few of the signs got burned up.  We hiked up to see the waterfall that we love and finally found it.  It's fine, of course, but the stream has changed course in a lot of places.  They had some rain up there recently and with no plants to hold any of the water back it just gushes down every gully and floods the river channels and changes them when the debris of fallen trees get all smashed up and dam it.  Pretty crazy what has already happened with just that much rain.  Hopefully the ground cover starts coming back and helps with some of the erosion problems.  The water carried lots of the ash and there is a layer of it on top of everything that the water brought down with it.  There was one place that one of the little bridges got washed out up at the top of the road by the last campsite. The stream got really crazy coming down there. There are still a lot of unburned trees and some that look like they will be able to make it even partially burned possibly.  People were up there clearing the area around the power lines and they were taking out some of the trees there. The lake is a mess with all of the debris that have washed down the stream and gathered there.  It's pretty sad.  But, overall, there was more left that I thought there would be.  We did drive through a neighborhood near the campground and a street that was furthest back by the mountain had several houses that had burned clear down there.  Pretty sad for those people.  It looks like the fire jumped the road between the pay booth and the lake and went up and over Gardner Peak and may over to Whipple Valley before they got it stopped.  We drove up the dirt road toward the Mill Flat Trailhead and we actually saw a place up on the mountain still smoking a little.  Hope we get some more rain soon, but also worried about the erosion issues it will cause if it does.  We weren't really supposed to be there, but I'm glad we went and we know what it's like now.