Wildfire on my hunting land - Part 1

Well, our hunting property burned up last week, but I'm just now getting around to posting in on the blog.  I was actually down there the Saturday before it burned up and that was when I shot the pig in the last post.  The fire occurred the very next day.  According to the newspapers the cause of the fire is thought to be lightning, but they haven't completely confirmed that yet.  The fire burned a total of 8,500 acres so I was by no means the only one affected.  No permanent homes were lost, but a lot of damage was done.

At least I got some neat pictures.  I had 5 trail cameras out when the fire hit and ended up with pictures of the fire on 3 of them. 2 of the cameras are going to be okay, 1 might make it and 2 are toast.  I didn't have the time on the cameras syncronized, so I can't really tell how long it took to go from one setup to the other, but you can see by the time stamps on the pictures that it was moving pretty fast.

Here's the camera that got hit first. Picture quality isn't very good, I'm guessing it was struggling with the smoke. You can see the leading edge of the fire toward the top of the picture.

50 seconds later and the fire has moved a bunch. The flames weren't even in view on the left side of the picture on the first one and they are pretty close on this one.

Just 3 seconds between these two pictures and the fire noticeablely advanced.

4 more seconds and it is back burning pretty intensely. I mowed a path in front of this camera and that slowed down the advance quite a bit when it hit the shorter grass, but it didn't stop it because the straps burned off the camera and it ended up on the ground. It might be salvageable.

Next camera. This one is setup on my protein feeder which somehow didn't end up burning up. This one doesn't have seconds on the time stamp so you can't really tell exactly how long elapses between each picture. These pictures do give a pretty good feel for the intensity of the fire.  Notice all the ash in the air in the first picture.

You can even see flames coming in front of the lens on this shot. This camera was pretty melted and I'm pretty sure it is toast but the SD card seems to still be fine.

The brush is burning pretty intensely in this shot.

Just 2 minutes on the time stamp from the first picture and the fire is already moving on with pretty much everything burned up. You can see that the plastic housing on the camera has melted and is covering up some of the lens.

This camera is setup on one of my spin feeders. In the first shot no actual flames are evident. Lots of smoke though.

37 seconds later and there are now plenty of flames.

32 seconds after that and things are pretty well engulfed.  This is just one minute and 9 seconds from the first picture when you couldn't even see the flames.

37 seconds later.

Less than 2 minutes later and the fire appears to be already out. Notice the temperature recorded on the bottom right of the screen, 128 degrees!

A few minutes later though and if you zoom in you can see that the fire isn't out, it's burning in the crack of the big mesquite tree.

The fire would burn in the crack of mesquite trees and over the next several hours burn the heart of the tree completely up and even down into the roots. The tree in that last picture ended up burning completely to the ground at the stump.

Here's an example of another tree that suffered the same fate.

Pretty amazing to have the fire documented with the trail cameras.  The damage to my property was pretty severe with nearly all of my largest mesquite trees destroyed and my travel trailer and a few other items burned up as well.  I'll post the details of the damage on another post.

That's it for now, Nathan.