Hike of the Week; Running from Reds

Running from Reds

The Rainbow Fire started 30 years ago this August and it’s still not done with me

Story and photos by Wendilyn Grasseschi

Times Reporter

The silver morning sun sends rays of light glancing off the clear, steaming turquoise water of Iva Belle Hotsprings, highlighting the steam of hot water running down the rock above me, turning it into a silver ribbon. It is the morning of Aug. 22, 1992 and the crystal clear blue sky above Fish Creek Valley could not be any bluer.

The morning is still except for the call of jays and juncos and the slight rustle of the breeze in the towering cedars and pines. My brother Ben and I are on a long-planned few days of vacation from our summer work; I am the crew boss for a backcountry trail crew for the Inyo National Forest based in Mammoth and he is a wilderness ranger at Convict Lake, and we have decided to use our time to explore the famous, backcountry Iva Belle Hotsprings, a 13-mile hike from Reds Meadow.

We sit quietly, letting the hot water soak in, watching the white clouds drift, listening to the trickle of the hot water that fees this pool cascade down the silver granite rock. There is nowhere more perfect than this, I think to myself. It is my first summer (of what will become 30 summers) in the Eastern Sierra and I have already fallen in love with the place; already realized it is going to be very, very hard to leave as planned after the summer is over and the absolute perfection of this backcountry hotspring, perched like a dream above the verdant valley of the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River, seals the deal.

It is then, as I scan the sky looking north and west toward Mammoth that I see it; a billow of black smoke rising over the forested rim of Cascade Valley. At first it is just a wisp, with smoke starting off low above the steep, 2,000-foot-tall valley walls, but within a few minutes, I watch it rise into a towering black cloud of ash, obscuring the clear morning sky. 

Trained as a firefighter, veteran of years of fighting wildland fires on federal Hotshot and regular fire crews, I know what I am looking at. 

“Shit,” I say, in typical firefighter vernacular. “Shit. That looks like it is right above Mammoth.”

That said, it is too soon to scatter like rabbits. Most often, wildfires are caught early (especially in those days) and the smoke is far enough away that we are in no danger at this time but as we watch the smoke for the next few hours, trying to fix its location and see if it is going to diminish, it only grows bigger and bigger and blacker and blacker. We are far in the backcountry and in 1992, there were no cell phones and even if there had been, we would not have had any reception.

As the hours drag by, it becomes clear this is no little fire that is going to be put out quickly and equally clear our vacation is over. I brought my old Forest Service King radio in with us and I know if this is a local fire, both Ben and I will be called to work it as we are both, by policy of the Inyo National Forest, trained to fight fire.

I call the Forest dispatcher and when the scratchy voice answers, the news is grim; the new Rainbow Fire, which had started via a lightning strike on Aug. 20, has already almost burned down the Reds Meadow Resort; thousands of people had already been evacuated by shuttle and car from the valley and the fire is threatening the town of Mammoth. We are also blocked from hiking out to Reds trailheads to get to our car at the trailhead; the fire is directly in our path. 

“You need to get out of there now,” the dispatcher says and she is right; by now the blue sky has turned to brown, the sun to a hot red ball and the scent of smoke is thick.

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