Forest Fire Threatens Desert Resort Towns

Two homes were destroyed Sunday and 500 were threatened as a forest fire raged out of control in Riverside County, sweeping perilously close to several resort communities.

Officials evacuated 250 homes in the well-to-do Pinyon Pines area and shut down California 74 for 16 miles south of Palm Desert. “There’s white ash all over everything,” said Riverside County Sheriff’s Sgt. John Sebastian.

Desert-view resort towns including Pinyon Crest, Alpine Village and Pinyon Flats were also threatened as the fire--sparked by lightning that struck a tree in the San Bernardino National Forest on Friday--grew to engulf 14,000 acres by Sunday night.

About half of the blackened acreage was in the national forest, with the remainder on Bureau of Land Management and private property, said Mary Bowman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Forest Service.

Firefighters were hampered Sunday by steep terrain, 100-degree-plus heat and wind gusts of up to 20 m.p.h., she said.

“The resources are stretched thin and firefighters are tired,” Bowman said.

Meanwhile, a 1,000-acre fire burned out of control near Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Sunday evening, where authorities evacuated several area campgrounds and closed California 173 between Lake Arrowhead and the desert community of Mojave Narrows.

Late Sunday, the blaze was burning three miles northeast of Lake Arrowhead and eight miles northwest of Big Bear, fire officials said.

The Riverside County fire, which began in the national forest near Pinyon Pines, covered little more than 100 acres on its first day, officials said. But it jumped wildly out of control Saturday and doubled in size Sunday.

Fire officials Sunday evening said they could not predict when the fire might be contained.

About 1,000 firefighters were working on the blaze, aided by 12 air tankers, Forest Service spokeswoman Ruth Wenstrom said. The steep terrain also played havoc with cellular phone connections, adding to firefighters’ problems.

The two blazes capped a week in which wildfires charred more than 30,000 acres at more than a dozen sites in Southern California.

A small fire, south of Idyllwild near Lake Hemet, was contained Sunday morning. It had threatened a housing development and forced evacuation of a campground, but no buildings were destroyed.

Firefighters on Saturday controlled another lightning-induced fire near the small community of Sage in southern Riverside County, which burned about 160 acres.