Lake Arrowhead Ca

An unrelenting wildfire jumped a fire line Tuesday in the San Bernardino Mountains and headed toward Lake Arrowhead, devouring homes and disease-racked forests in its path. Downcast fire officials said they appeared to be losing their battle for the alpine resort region.

Past blackened lots, past rows of chimneys marking the spots where houses once stood, the convoy of creatures traveled back to their own ruined home. Two raccoons, a pair of black bear cubs, a coyote and a great horned owl returned by pickup truck last week to Wildhaven Ranch, an animal sanctuary that, like many of its neighboring human dwellings, burned in last month's wildfires.

Three weeks after flames claimed close to 300 homes in the San Bernardino Mountains, residents are waking up to a familiar reality: The pine trees killed by drought and bark beetles remain, and bucolic communities are as much a tinder box as they were before the fires. In fact, forestry and fire officials believe that the Old fire, which broke out in late October, may have increased the danger to the heavily populated Lake Arrowhead area.

While thousands of neighbors fled the burning mountains around him, Scott Garrett ignored a mandatory evacuation order to try to save his 6,000-square-foot home on a hillside west of Lake Arrowhead. Inside: a stash of movie memorabilia, including a large winged angel statue from the Ben Affleck movie "Daredevil" and a costume from "Planet of the Apes. " Garrett, 48, a semiretired movie studio art department technician, filled large buckets with water and sprayed his wood deck with fire retardant.

Four years of drought have left Lake Arrowhead a community at odds, pitting neighbor against neighbor in tense disputes over their crisis and their future stability. Community activists, residents and others around the lake are arguing over proposed building projects that could affect water supplies, strategies for evacuating the area in the event of a major fire, tree removal programs and control of the lake that provides water to 7,500 homes.

Their mission was to save Arrowbear. And although the winds had flagged Wednesday, the flames that roared out of the backcountry continued their march toward the hamlet in the San Bernardino Mountains, testing the tools, backs and lungs of the Big Bear Hot Shots, a frontline Forest Service crew that fights fires by hand. When things got desperate, when all the hoeing and shoveling could not stop the fire's advance, the team called in Chris Ivey and his dead buddy's bulldozer.

As we waited for the proprietor to open the front door of the Storybook Inn, I thought: So far, so good. We had found the inn perched off Highway 18 in a stretch of remarkable vistas that made it plain why this road is called the Rim of the World. The neatly renovated 1940 clapboard structure was even more attractive than it appeared on the Web. But my husband, Sean, and I were bringing our two kids, 6 and 8, and kids are at best a question mark at a bed-and-breakfast.

It was shortly after Susan Helmle paid $600,000 for her dream home in Lake Arrowhead that she noticed one of the pine trees in her driveway was a little yellow. "I didn't think anything of it at the time," she said. But in the last 18 months, Helmle has spent $20,000 to cut down that tree and almost 30 others like it because of a hungry pest -- the Western bark beetle -- that has devoured the mighty pines around her house.

If there's a silver lining to last year's devastating Southern California wildfires, it may be that denizens of picturesque Lake Arrowhead and surrounding communities in the San Bernardino Mountains are learning to see the forest for the trees.

It was a season of skinny pumpkins and fat squirrels. Seemingly in conspiracy against contestants in the pumpkin-growing contest, squirrels and their pillaging ilk -- gophers, raccoons and bears -- were on the attack. Traps and chicken wire were strategically placed. One woman stood watch with a BB gun, challenging the intruders to show themselves. Many pumpkins that were not poached merely withered on the vine without explanation.