Tracking Down a Catastrophic Fire’s First Spark
Just west of Whiskeytown, California, at the foot of Merry Mountain and less than a hundred paces from Clear Creek, Jim Engel and I stood on the side of Highway 299 looking out over a crescent-shaped basin with no name. The basin was circumscribed by two arcs: on one side, the highway; on the other, a narrow access road. A little more than a week earlier, it had been mostly green.
By the time we arrived, it was scorched almost to a monochrome. The landscape looked to me as though it may as well have all combusted in an instant. But to Engel, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s chief wildfire investigator in the northern part of the state, that basin and what remained of its contents held all the clues needed to pinpoint the specific origin and cause of the Carr Fire, which killed eight people and destroyed more
