Had to Evacuate Tunnel Fire AZ

Had to Evacuate Tunnel Fire AZ, I am jumping ahead on my blog post to what happened last week. Let me tell you, my nerves were on high alert as we were camping in the Coconino Mountains when all of a sudden smoke is gaining ground just south of us.

Let me start at the beginning. We have been on the road for 8 months now and I have a lot of photos still to go through from back in February. But I am jumping ahead to just last week on April 19th, we decided to head to some BLM land, (Bureau of Land Management), which is free camping just north of Flagstaff AZ, we were camping south of Flagstaff the week before.

Arizona and Texas are very dry, we have not seen rain for almost 3 months on this journey. The dust is so bad everywhere in the south when the wind blows and we decided to head north to get away from it. Even though the weather warned of high winds on this particular day. But the BLM land was only 1 1/2 hour drive north, so we figured we could get there before the winds picked up to bad.

This photo below is our drive right before the Coconino Mountains, we will be stopping just on the other side. As we pass the mountains on the left, we noticed some smoke near the mountain. I thought that can’t be good to have any kind of smoke on such a windy day.

We found a campsite not to far from the main road, one other camper was on that road as well. A beautiful spot with tall Pondarosa pine trees and lots of dry grass. There is a lot of burnt trees there already I noticed, as if a fire had gone through there not to long ago.

We set up camp and I made some lunch, as we were eating a strange looking bird landed on our jeep, it was really interested in the red brake lights on top and the red can on top of the jeep.

I have no idea what kind of bird this is, if any one does let me know.

Then my husband looked out the door and said, ” Is that dust or smoke?”. I went outside and I said this is smoke. Our phone’s started to alert of danger, I quick got into the jeep and drove down to the other campers to see what they might know of the situation. They said the fire from way over there by the west mountains had spread and it just jumped the road to where we are and they were leaving.

So I quickly went back to the RV and said we need to go now. We got to the main road and the police were already helping people to leave on the west side of the road and were blocking traffic from going south.

The map below shows a red dot, that is where we are camping and the pink and green area is the fire spreading across that area.

The winds are now gusting over 50 miles an hour, which is not safe to drive a high profile vehicle in. So I found a spot about 30 min north of the fire to stop and wait out the wind before going any farther. This is where I took the photos from shown below.

They ended up blocking traffic right where we were parked at and we ended up staying there all night. Exhausted and stressed to say the least, 2 other campers stayed the night there as well.

I looked out the window a lot that night, checking to see that the fire did not start to spread north towards us. By morning the smoke was still heavy across the landscape and the fire as of today has burned over 20,000 acres. I have not heard the source of this fire yet.

This could be a bad year for fires, we all need to take care and be mindful of our environment around us. One gentleman we talked to that lives around here said, ” This place used to be paradise when he was growing up here and now it is a rat race”.

Had to Evacuate Tunnel Fire AZ

by Sandra J