San Bernardino Mountains

Firefighters have fully contained a small but persistent fire in the San Bernardino National Forest that was one of many blazes sparked by lightning more than two weeks ago. Sparked on Aug. 19, the Gobblers fire grew to 413 acres and was driven into the Stockton Flats area after being fueled by down-canyon winds, steep terrain and dry sagebrush, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The fire was fully contained Tuesday, but some crews remained on “patrol status” Wednesday. Although smoke was visible from Cajon Pass and the high desert, the fire had not threatened any homes or communities.

A children's bunk room that sleeps 12, maids quarters and a guesthouse mean there's plenty of room for the ski crowd at this three-story retreat on a wooded lot in the San Bernardino Mountains. The lodge-like living room, with soaring ceilings and wooden beams, centers on an oversized stone fireplace. Location: 160 Cedar Ridge Drive, Lake Arrowhead 92352 Asking price: $7.499 million Year built: 1996 House size: Nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, 17,000 square feet Lot size: Four acres Features: Paneled office, den with bar, elevator, library, two-island kitchen, breakfast nook, gym, indoor spa and sauna, wine cellar and tasting room, terraces, attached garage space for six vehicles, outdoor kitchen About the area: Last year, 534 single-family homes sold in the 92352 ZIP Code at a median price of $285,000, according to DataQuick.

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.

While the East Coast braces for another series of frigid storms, California ski resort operators are cursing Mother Nature for a winter of unseasonably warm temperatures and persistent blue skies. California's driest year on record has dropped snowpack levels to about 15% of the season average and reduced skier visitation numbers as much as 45%, compared with last year. To draw skiers and snowboarders to the slopes, some resorts are offering two-for-one ticket deals and $1 beers.

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.

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.

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.

In its heyday, Santa's Village was one of Southern California's biggest tourist attractions -- a place to catch the holiday spirit even in July. It opened on Memorial Day weekend 1955, more than a month before Disneyland. But after 43 years of delighting young and old in the San Bernardino Mountains, the 15-acre elfin theme park -- with fanciful, life-size gingerbread and doll houses, a candy kitchen and a toy shop -- fell on hard times and closed in 1998.

A children's bunk room that sleeps 12, maids quarters and a guesthouse mean there's plenty of room for the ski crowd at this three-story retreat on a wooded lot in the San Bernardino Mountains. The lodge-like living room, with soaring ceilings and wooden beams, centers on an oversized stone fireplace. Location: 160 Cedar Ridge Drive, Lake Arrowhead 92352 Asking price: $7.499 million Year built: 1996 House size: Nine bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, 17,000 square feet Lot size: Four acres Features: Paneled office, den with bar, elevator, library, two-island kitchen, breakfast nook, gym, indoor spa and sauna, wine cellar and tasting room, terraces, attached garage space for six vehicles, outdoor kitchen About the area: Last year, 534 single-family homes sold in the 92352 ZIP Code at a median price of $285,000, according to DataQuick.

The Revolution of Every Day A Novel Cari Luna Tin House: 392 pp., $15.95 paper Much has been written recently about the impossibility of a middle-class existence in New York. Cari Luna sets her sights on an even more beleaguered socio-economic group with her excellent debut novel, "The Revolution of Every Day," which looks at squatter culture in the mid-'90s, when a tenement house in Manhattan's East Village could be seized by idealistic rebels. At Thirteen House, one of a clique of interconnected squats, a young runaway named Amelia is pregnant, but not by Gerrit, her Dutch boyfriend with a savior complex (he helped her kick heroin)

This post has been updated below. Snow was falling in Southern California mountain areas Thursday night as cold air was expected to drop snow levels to 3,500 feet. The National Weather Service said that six to 12 inches of snow was expected to fall in the San Gabriel Mountains. In the Antelope Valley foothills, three to six inches of snow could fall. On Thursday night, fire and police crews were searching for at least person who may have been trapped on an island in the Santa Ana riverbed in Colton in San Bernardino County, police said.

An injured hiker who had been missing for five days was rescued near Lake Arrowhead on Sunday after he started what turned into a small brush fire. Rodney Trumbo, 55, was reported missing Tuesday when he didn't return from a hike in the San Bernardino Mountains, the San Bernardino Sun reported.  He had used a cellphone to call his girlfriend to tell her he was injured. Trumbo also complained of being dehydrated and in pain. Rescue crews spotted Trumbo after responding to a brush fire that burned a 20-foot-by-30-foot area, the Sun reported.

An early season storm Wednesday brought showers and rain to Southern California and snow to mountain areas. Rainfall varied across the region, with some areas reporting light showers and others a half-inch or more, according to the National Weather Service. By Wednesday evening, Burbank had recorded 0.10 of an inch of rain, but more than a quarter-inch had fallen at the Santa Monica Pier, the Weather Service said. More than a half-inch of rain was reported in Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County and Palomar Mountain in San Diego County, according to the Weather Service.

Firefighters have fully contained a small but persistent fire in the San Bernardino National Forest that was one of many blazes sparked by lightning more than two weeks ago. Sparked on Aug. 19, the Gobblers fire grew to 413 acres and was driven into the Stockton Flats area after being fueled by down-canyon winds, steep terrain and dry sagebrush, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The fire was fully contained Tuesday, but some crews remained on “patrol status” Wednesday. Although smoke was visible from Cajon Pass and the high desert, the fire had not threatened any homes or communities.

The news traveled quickly, by way of phone calls and text messages, spreading throughout the sport of figure skating. The Ice Castle was closing down. The small rink, nestled amid pines beside Lake Arrowhead, had served as an unlikely mecca for skaters from around the world, turning out champions for the better part of three decades. Michelle Kwan trained there, as did Robin Cousins, Nicole Bobek, Chen Lu and Surya Bonaly. Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, the gold medal pair from the 2010 Winter Olympics, made it their home base.

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.

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.

A wildfire stoked by powerful winds had charred 1,600 acres near the primary roadway leading to Yosemite National Park on Monday night and led authorities to evacuate at least 150 homes. More than 700 firefighters were battling the Carstens fire, which broke out Sunday afternoon east of State Route 140 in the Midpines area, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. No structures had been reported damaged, but evacuations had been ordered for areas including Hites Cove, Jerseydale and Clarks Valley, fire officials said.

SACRAMENTO - Live from the Capitol, it's Tim Donnelly - on Facebook, on Twitter and on the Assembly floor, where he frequently denounces bills he dislikes. A two-term Republican lawmaker from San Bernardino County, he likes to be heard. Just after punching a green button for "yes" or, more often, the red button "no," he takes to social media to tell the world how he voted and why. "I send them live from the floor because I believe the people have a right to know," says Donnelly, 47, a self-described tea party conservative from Twin Peaks in the San Bernardino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead.