Angeles National Forest

The relentless Station fire has scoured nearly 242 square miles of the Angeles National Forest, burning through not just picnic areas and campgrounds, but the raw, solitary beauty that has long been a refuge for a sprawling city. Ridge after ridge is a ghostly gray, laid bare of vegetation from the plunging foothill canyons to the Mojave Desert. Only scattered islands of trees are un-charred -- in the deepest draws and in remote, rocky cornices on a few high ridges. "What I saw was a pretty complete burn," said U.S. Forest Service spokesman Stanton Florea.

The thick blanket of smoke pouring into the Los Angeles Basin from two brush fires in the Angeles National Forest is expected to linger through the weekend, prompting health warnings and halting some school athletic programs. The smoke from a fire north of Azusa that began Tuesday and a blaze above La Cañada Flintridge that broke out Wednesday resulted in unhealthy air pollution levels in the San Gabriel Valley as well as parts of Los Angeles. Weather experts blame weak winds -- which actually prevented the fires from burning more intensely -- for keeping the smoke from dissipating.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department homicide detectives are investigating the death of a man they say may have been set on fire early Saturday near the 5 Freeway in Angeles National Forest. Los Angeles County firefighters discovered the badly burned body after a passerby reported seeing what was described as a debris fire about 12:30 a.m. near the Templin Highway off-ramp. There were no vehicles or other people in the area at the time of the discovery, authorities said. The man has not been identified.

Los Angeles County sheriff's detectives hope to question a man who was spotted tending a small fire in the vicinity of the Station fire almost one week before that deadly blaze erupted in the Angeles National Forest. At a news conference Monday, homicide detectives requested the public's help in locating a 25-year-old homeless man who was caught "feeding" a small, uncontrolled fire in the early afternoon of Aug. 20 -- six days before the start of the devastating Station fire. The man, Babatunsin Olukunle, a Nigerian national, was reportedly caught tending a fire near mile marker 36 of the Angeles Crest Highway.

Just as it strains the imagination to picture a universe that stretches to infinity, we struggle to visualize a quarter of the Angeles National Forest burned to the ground. What does that look like, 160,000 blackened acres? It looks like forever. Nature, of course, takes the long view. Except for the extinction of species, little is forever. Flowers will crop up in the spring, then sage scrub and chaparral. Trees will require decades, but even that amounts to a brief moment in the evolution of an ecosystem.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other authorities held them up as examples of irresponsible behavior. They were the butt of jokes. But one of the two Big Tujunga Canyon residents who jumped into a hot tub to escape the raging Station fire says they are being unfairly judged. Julius Goff, who suffered serious burns, told The Times that he did not ignore a mandatory evacuation order but instead stayed behind to warn 10 neighbors who did not receive the order to leave. By the time he reached his own house, with plans to get his housemate and get out, the fire had surrounded them.

Big Tujunga Canyon residents and others reeling from the Station fire called Monday for a federal investigation into what they termed a poor initial response to the deadly blaze by the U.S. Forest Service . "It was beyond irresponsibility, beyond neglect," said Cindy Marie Pain, who lost her Big Tujunga Canyon home to the fire, which broke out in the Angeles National Forest on Aug. 26. Pain and other residents said they were outraged by...

The unstoppable Angeles National Forest fire threatened 10,000 homes Saturday night as it more than tripled in size and chewed through a rapidly widening swath of the Crescenta Valley, where flames closed in on backyards and at least 1,000 homes were ordered evacuated. Sending an ominous plume of smoke above the Los Angeles Basin, the fire was fueled by unrelenting hot weather and dense brush that has not burned in 60 years. It took off Saturday afternoon in all directions, forcing residents out of homes from Big Tujunga Canyon to Pasadena, and reached toward Mt. Wilson.

Magic Mountain, a rugged peak rising out of the Angeles National Forest, is unknown to all but the most intrepid hikers. For good reason. The former Nike missile site -- not the amusement park of the same name -- is a Cold War remnant, one of 16 such outposts erected around Los Angeles during the 1950s as an air defense system. This battery, with its subterranean concrete missile silos, was built in 1955 and monitored by the Army until the '70s.

There has been tragedy and loss aplenty in the fire ravaging the Angeles National Forest, but it has been particularly poignant -- and, somehow, humblingly circular -- to watch what's probably the first natural element man subdued to his purpose threatening one of the great monuments of modern science. The 101-year-old observatory at the top of Mt. Wilson houses some of the most productive scientific instruments of the 20th century, and it continues to play a cutting-edge role in various branches of astronomy, though the ambient nighttime light rising from the metropolis that now sprawls up its foothills makes deep space observation too difficult.