Smoke Takes the Inspiration Out of View

On a normal summer day at Inspiration Point, camera-toting tourists by the hundreds struggle for parking spaces to take a peek at this park’s most famous and majestic sights--El Capitan, Half Dome and the Cathedral Rocks.

Locals and visitors alike say there is no other view like it in the world.

“We don’t use words like incredible, inspiring or spectacular,” one Yosemite veteran said. “We just know that it is.”

But on Friday afternoon, only an occasional squirrel came to gaze off into the distance from the vista point on California 41. There were no tourists. And had they been there, there was nothing for them to see.

Thick smoke from two fires that have charred 12,000 acres in the park since Wednesday clung over Yosemite Valley like a blanket. The dusty atmosphere obscured the famous view from Inspiration Point.

“This isn’t very inspiring,” local Jerry Rankin complained as he squinted into the haze, trying to make out the outline of El Capitan.

“I know it’s out there somewhere,” said his wife, Anne-Jeannette. The pair had chosen not to join the throngs leaving the park earlier in the day.

It was an unusual sight for what is normally the busiest time of the year in what many think is America’s most beautiful national park.

An estimated 10,000 visitors were evacuated from the park late Thursday night and early Friday morning when officials closed it because of the fires.

Spokesmen for the U.S. Forest Service say there is “little chance” that the two blazes--fueled by unpredictable winds and low humidity--would threaten the main area of the park at Yosemite Valley. But officials took no chances and ordered the evacuation of thousands of vacationers from the valley.

By 5 a.m. Friday, the main highway into the park from the west--California 140--was clogged with traffic.

“For most of six hours it looked like the Santa Monica Freeway at 7 o’clock in the morning,” one park veteran said.

What the vacationers left behind was an empty park and employees who suddenly found themselves with other jobs.

The picturesque hotel at Wawona, near the park’s southern entrance, became a staging area for some of the hundreds of firefighters brought in to combat the fires.

During breaks the weary firefighters, in bright yellow protective suits, whiled the time away by lounging on the hotel’s neatly trimmed lawns or playing an impromptu game of softball on the hotel’s frontage road.

Anne-Jeannette Rankin, who manages two bookstores inside the park for the Yosemite Natural History Assn., became an instant tour guide for out-of-the-area firefighters.

“They’d get finished with one hot spot and then I’d tell them how to get to the next one,” she said.

Among the firefighters she came across Friday afternoon were members of two forestry strike teams who drove all night Thursday from San Bernardino.

“We just finished mopping up here,” said firefighter Mike Dier, 31, of Crestline, as he looked at smoldering brush near Grouse Creek.

“We’ve gotten three hours of sleep, but we’ve got to keep going,” Dier said.

There was some humor in the midst of charred acreage and the uncommon absence of visitors.

A homeowner in the Yosemite West community, at the park’s southwest flank, left a sign for firefighters as he evacuated with his belongings. The message, which had some firefighters chuckling, simply said:

“Sprinkler on roof--turn on.”