If you hadn’t had time to notice, the skies cleared considerably today and from the reports this morning things are looking up. I drove up to the roadblock southwest of the town of Big Horn this evening and chatted a little with the man stationed there. He, along with four others have been working the barricade since the fire started, and suspects they will be pressed into service on the Bone Creek fire soon. It was just before sunset, and I’ve always been drawn to these rock formations east of Little Goose Canyon. This is another stop on my photographic journeys once the fire is out and the public is once again allowed back into the area. I’ll have to find out if I can access it from public land, or if I’ll have to get permission from landowners in the area. Does anyone out there know off hand?

Before the fire, I had started a post on methods of perception, and tomorrow I’ll see if I can finish it up and get it posted. For those of you wanting information about the progress on the Little Goose Fire, I’ll keep that up as well.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.

I had planned on posting this earlier, but my blog host had a system problem. Not too much to report tonight except that the hot spots in the canyons on the eastern slope south of Red Grade road seem to have either been put out, or have burned themselves out. Now all the work is on top, outside of my view. I’m looking at Google Earth tonight and seeing if there is a vantage point I can reach off of highway 14 on top to see what things look like.

The photo was taken from my yard after my run up past the town of Big Horn tonight. I call it Walking on Fire because of the silhouette formed by the break in the clouds.

[Edit: I've changed the name of the image to Firewalker.]

This shot was from my yard about 7 PM and it is of the sun, not the moon. I used spot metering rather than matrix. Matrix metering looks at the overall image in the viewfinder and then “averages” the exposure for the entire image. In this case the area surrounding the sun was just a featureless gray.

On to the Little Goose Fire. This morning the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) website reports the fire is now at 4827 acres 45% contained (up from 4807 acres and 40% yesterday). Progress might seem slow to those of us with no fire fighting experience, but we have to remember they are working with limited resources and manpower due to the other fires in the west.

Speaking of the west, the fire in Yellowstone has jumped the eastern park boundary and evacuations of some of the lodges and campgrounds are underway according to the Sheridan Media website (more on the Little Goose fire there as well). I just talked with my cousin who owns the Elephant Head Lodge, 10 miles from the east entrance to Yellowstone, and the Forest Service says at the moment they appear to be OK, but as we all know, that can change quickly. This fire may still be burning when the first snows fall. For those of you who haven’t been over there in some time, the Bark Beetles have been working overtime east of the Park, and if the fire gets into those areas where 50 to 70% – or more – of the trees are dead…. well, I can’t even imagine.