San Bernardino Mountains

The bodies of four people were found Tuesday in the wreckage of a small plane that crashed in the foggy San Bernardino Mountains during a weekend flight from Las Vegas. The three men and one woman were not immediately identified. They probably died on impact, said Chip Patterson, a spokesman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. Part of a wing was torn off, but the fuselage was largely intact and there was no sign of fire, Patterson said.

Ten-year-old Briza Hernandez seems like a shy, soft-spoken kid, but her 16-year-old half-sister, Nancy, warns otherwise. "She's quiet now, but she's really not," Nancy said. "When you get to know her, she explodes everywhere. She's like a ball of energy. " Under a sunny patio next to the playground in their South-Central apartment, Briza's energy starts to filter through her tiny body as she fidgets and bounces around, letting out fits of giggles at times. Although the family of six (mother, stepfather and four daughters)

Blue skies, evergreen forests, azure lakes and a host of bed and breakfast inns promise relief from the megalopolis in midsummer. "It's a lot nicer up here than it is down there," said Janice Hague, who was having a leisurely breakfast with her husband Chris on the back porch of the Eagle's Nest B&B in this quiet alpine community.

The Amgen Tour of California cycling race for 2011 will have a visually spectacular mountaintop finish on the second-to-last stage at Mt. Baldy after beginning with a high-altitude first stage that takes cyclists around Lake Tahoe, organizers announced. The May 15-22 event, America's largest stage race, will again feature a time trial in Solvang after a one-time move to downtown Los Angeles last spring. In addition, race director Andrew Messick said the Claremont-to-Mt.

On the kitchen table of the Masonic lodge in this mountain village, Jim Asher gently unloaded 20 seedling giant sequoias from a cardboard box he received in the mail a few days ago. They were the first of 30,000 such trees that Asher's Rim of the World Masonic Lodge bought from an Oregon nursery for resale locally as part of an ambitious, and somewhat controversial, effort to reclaim the San Bernardino Mountains' burned and beetle-ravaged forests.

Let's face facts. In Orange County, the fall season is nothing more than a hiccup between summer's heat and winter's chill. Palm trees never burst into vivid color, and there isn't a decent pile of dry leaves to shuffle though on the entire block. However, you can still savor the cool, crisp flavor of fall in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 90 minutes outside Orange County.

San Bernardino County and federal conservation officials approved a $70-million project Tuesday to remove thousands of dead and dying trees from the San Bernardino Mountains, the biggest effort so far to clear timber that could fuel another deadly firestorm.

A grove of pine, fir and cedar trees on a scenic incline near the wooded community of Twin Peaks was largely spared by the wildfires that destroyed thousands of acres in the San Bernardino Mountains last year. The grove -- home to snakes, squirrels and birds -- may soon be partly cleared by bulldozers and backhoes under a plan to build a 50-acre Christian-sponsored camp for boys, with dorm rooms, swimming pools, two amphitheaters and a gun range.

Hundreds of Lake Arrowhead-area homes could never have been protected by Road Queens, a nickname for the big, iconic, ladder-hauling fire engines that are designed to save structures. Up in the mountains, in neighborhoods built along streets as narrow and bendy as creek beds, keeping fire out of yards and living rooms is a job for the boxy but nimble trucks -- the brush engines -- of the U.S. Forest Service's strike teams.

Wildfires and flash floods caused so much damage to California 18 that the venerable route linking Southern California to San Bernardino County's mountain resorts will remain closed at least until May, officials said. The October wildfires that raced through the San Bernardino Mountains produced such heat that they "baked" some big boulders along California 18, making them susceptible to breaking up.

A San Bernardino man was charged Tuesday with five counts of murder for allegedly setting the massive 2003 Old fire that destroyed nearly a 1,000 homes. Rickie Lee Fowler, 28, who has been in state prison since 2003 for burglary, also was charged with arson and aggravated arson, authorities said. If convicted, he could face the death penalty. "The investigators in this case never gave up; there was tremendous follow-up," San Bernardino County Dist. Atty. Mike Ramos said at a news conference Tuesday.

Even in the world of big-ticket water projects, where delays, cost overruns and controversy are frequent, the inelegantly named Inland Feeder Project was in a class of its own. In its two decades, the project has faced fire, flood, regulatory disputes, difficult geology, grouting problems, earthquake considerations, a switch of contractors and more. At one point it was $100 million over budget. The boss at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California jokes that the project suffered everything but a plague of locusts.

From the Hollywood Hills to the Nevada state line, people reported seeing a fireball streaking across the sky and appearing to fall toward the San Bernardino Mountains on Tuesday morning. But explanations of the mysterious object were scarce. San Bernardino County Fire Dispatch reported receiving dozens of calls related to a fireball moving at high speed in the northwest sky around 10:40 a.m. "We got quite a few reports.

Rescuers continued to hold out hope Saturday that they would find a retired schoolteacher from North Hollywood who got lost on a hike during last weekend's heavy storms in the San Bernardino Mountains. Dean Christy, 62, is an avid hiker and an experienced outdoorsman, said San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Jodi Miller. "We are hopeful he was able to establish a shelter to get out of the weather and that he will be able to survive this," she said.

After Santa Ana winds and monster-size surf, a blast of cold air overnight Saturday was expected to generate another extreme weather phenomenon in the mountains: thundersnow. Saturday night, snowfall shut down Interstate 5 near Castaic, the California Highway Patrol reported. The southbound I-5 was closed starting on the northern end of the Grapevine, and the northbound lanes were shut down at Parker Road. Traffic was being diverted to highways 14 and 58.

San Bernardino may not be the Eden the early inhabitants stumbled upon, but the creeks and river are still inviting, and snowcapped mountains grace its backdoor in the wintertime. Sports and cultural events abound in this storied city where the McDonald brothers opened the restaurant whose name became synonymous with fast food. Beginnings Mormon pioneers from Salt Lake City arrived in San Bernardino in 1851, drawn to a valley rich in water, willows and sycamores.

The residents in this rough-and-ready canyon village in the San Bernardino Mountains have steeled themselves against nature's high jinks over the years--the snow avalanches, the flash floods, the fires.

Nestled high in the San Bernardino Mountains among centuries-old Ponderosa pines, Fantasy Forest at Santa's Village is a family attraction that puts the theme in theme park--a place to catch the holiday spirit any time of the year. But after 42 years of delighting young and old, Santa and his reindeer are packing it up and moving back to the North Pole this spring as Santa's Village closes shop for good.

While much of fire-ravaged Southern California lurched back toward an uneasy routine Friday and government officials made preparations for a long recovery, firefighters poised for another late-night stand against a persistent blaze in the rugged mountains of eastern Orange County. Even as thousands of residents joyously returned to neighborhoods throughout the region, 100-foot-tall flames from the Santiago fire burned into the eastern end of Silverado Canyon.

Hundreds of Lake Arrowhead-area homes could never have been protected by Road Queens, a nickname for the big, iconic, ladder-hauling fire engines that are designed to save structures. Up in the mountains, in neighborhoods built along streets as narrow and bendy as creek beds, keeping fire out of yards and living rooms is a job for the boxy but nimble trucks -- the brush engines -- of the U.S. Forest Service's strike teams.