National Forests

More than 1,000 firefighters converged on this village in the Gila National Forest on Saturday as a massive wildfire that scorched eastern Arizona moved to within a quarter of a mile from the New Mexico border. With the winds picking up, temperatures rising and humidity low, the National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning for this sparsely populated corner of the state, indicating grave fire danger. "Everything is ripe for a perfect storm," Fire Information Officer Sean Johnson said.

The U.S. Forest Service on Monday will reopen popular picnic areas, hiking trails and campgrounds across 98,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest that had been closed since the Station fire scorched the San Gabriel Mountains nearly two years ago. The reopening could not come soon enough for Tyler Wallace, a 32-year-old engineer and avid hiker, who was forced to seek another adventure Sunday when a forest ranger said Wallace would not be able...

What a difference a road makes. Highway 39, the winding mountain road that provides the only access to Crystal Lake and other recreational areas of the Angeles National Forest from Azusa, quietly reopened this spring, breathing new life into a mountain resort that dates to the 1930s. Now forest officials are working to fully reopen trails and campgrounds at Crystal Lake, which is open for day use. The natural lake at almost 6,000 feet was closed after the Curve Fire of 2002 destroyed about 20,000 acres as well as hiking trails and campsites in the area.

A body found in Angeles National Forest with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound was identified Tuesday as that of a Huntington Beach man suspected of killing his longtime friend, authorities said. The body of 55-year-old Kevin Wolfe Pochter was found Monday near the Chantry Flat campground a short distance from where his longtime friend, Dean Albert, 53, of Arcadia was found Thursday with multiple gunshot wounds. Albert later died from those injuries. Investigators began searching for Pochter, an experienced hiker, over the weekend in the wilderness areas surrounding the campground.

Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout Philip Connors Ecco Press; 246 pp., $24.99 With its glowing orange cover and title, "Fire Season" looks like another western tale of man versus flame. It turns out to be far rarer than that: a quirky meditation on the lonely pleasures of summers in a 7-by-7-foot lookout tower in a particularly wild patch of the Southwest. Every April, Philip Connors leaves behind his bartending job and his wife, Martha, in a small New Mexico town and heads for Apache Peak in the nearby Gila National Forest.

A few years ago, the U.S. Forest Service was getting ready to open up several large stands of old-growth trees here on Kupreanof Island in an attempt to sustain southeast Alaska's beleaguered timber industry. The target was up to 70 million board feet of timber. Much of it would be plucked from remote, roadless forests. Even getting to the trees was going to mean building 25 miles of roads at a cost of more than $6 million. The three tiny sawmills in nearby Kake, where the unemployment rate is 80%, couldn't hope to bid on such a massive and expensive logging operation.

Federal supervisors would have to run the country's national forests to maintain ecological health and species diversity under a proposed Obama administration rule that also requires them to prepare environmental reviews when they update forest management plans. The 94-page document is the latest version of a forest planning rule that has gone through a decade of revision and litigation as changing administrations left their stamps on it. It would shape the future of the 193-million-acre national forest system, including more than 20 million acres in California.

It’s been a fantastic early season for Southern California ski resorts, with some selling out over the holiday week. Now the diminutive Mt. Waterman (whose motto is "Snow from heaven, not from hoses") has received some of the white stuff and plans to open at 9 a.m. Friday for the first time this season. The resort in the Angeles National Forest will remain open 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday as well. So far, it has a foot of fresh snow and a base of 24 to 30 inches, according to its website.

The longtime supervisor of the Angeles National Forest, a target of some criticism over the handling of last year's Station fire, has been reassigned to the same job in the San Bernardino National Forest, officials said Friday. Jody Noiron, who has led the Angeles forest since 2000, was in a position to influence key decisions on the deployment of crews, equipment and aircraft during the initial attack on the Station blaze, the largest in Los Angeles County history. The move came on the eve of a scheduled meeting next week of a congressional panel to examine the response to the fire.

I wouldn't call it a vacation, exactly. Any time you have three pet llamas and a 3-year-old and you're covering 30 miles in less than a week, it's like, well, let's call it an adventure. My wife, Amber, and I and our high-energy daughter Ediza spent a week in early August exploring the breathtaking terrain between the Mammoth Lakes area and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. The adults got a chance to experience the high-elevation landscape through a child's eyes: sledding down a mound of snow on a sleeping pad, pretending to fish with a stick, collecting feathers along the trail, assigning names to the ants crawling on the ground.