11:23 AM MST on Thursday, October 30, 2003

By GUY McCARTHY and GEORGE WATSON / The Press-Enterprise

SKYFOREST - Churning waves of crimson flame surrounded Battalion Chief Sid Hultquist's vehicle. They leaped hundreds of feet into the air, with one tentacle heaving and undulating while a blizzard of embers whipped orange light trails under and around the Ford Explorer.

Hultquist wiped his eyes repeatedly and dabbed at his runny nose. A temperature gauge on his windshield read 111 degrees. Despite the air conditioning running on high, the air inside his SUV was bitter and acrid with smoke.

"We're going nowhere right now," Hultquist, a structure-protection supervisor for Lake Arrowhead Fire Department, said into his radio mike. "I'm . . . in an extreme firestorm at Heaps Peak helipad. If this doesn't burn everything around here, I'll be totally amazed."

The see-saw battle to save Lake Arrowhead and other San Bernardino Mountain communities from raging fires took a bad turn about 7 a.m. Wednesday. Winds blasting higher than 60 mph drove an inferno up and over a mile-and-a-half stretch of Highway 18 between Skyforest and Running Springs.

It was another instance in recent days when firefighters have been powerless in the face of fire's fury. Yet Hultquist and his crews refused to yield.

Standing on weary legs and straining through bloodshot eyes, they tried to match the blaze's relentlessness with their own determination. They were desperate to save the homes of 80,000 people -- including those belonging to firefighters.

'Unbelievable' fury

Hultquist and more than a dozen fire enginecrews decided to ride out the incoming conflagration, finding refuge in a cement company's sand yard near Heaps Peak.

Just a few feet away, David Shew readied his crew. Engines would set up every 200 to 300 feet along the highway, said the California Department of Forestry battalion chief.

"We're going to do what we can, if we can do anything," Shew said to eight men, some with boyish faces covered in soot. "But if the thing is boiling, each one of us has to look out for the other."

He then pointed to a cleft in the mountain, a steep descent filled with dry trees and shrubs, fuel to feed the fire's hunger.

"That's the chute," he said. "Don't be in the middle of that thing."

Firefighter Owen Head glanced at the rim where black smoke tumbled up and over the edge, soaring a thousand feet in the sky.

"Don't worry," Head said.

A few minutes later, the light changed abruptly from pitch dark to bright white and back again, then red and orange as flames in the near distance towered over and engulfed 30-foot pines.

"It's creating its own wind, out of a convection column at the heart of the fire," said Hultquist, who is based in Adelanto. "It's blowing 60 to 70 mph, enough to carry embers half a mile at least. That means Lake Arrowhead is in big trouble."

Radio transmissions from other commanders cautioned Hultquist's crews to sit tight and weather the worst. Plastic traffic cones were melting 10 feet away from Hultquist.

"I've been in a lot of serious fires, but I've never seen anything like this," said Hultquist, 43, who has 22 years of firefighting experience. "The sheer ferocity of it. The extreme fire behavior. It's unbelievable. If you were outside right now you'd be toast."

Other firefighters headed a third of a mile east along Highway 18. They stopped to watch the fire scale the road where they had just been and tear into the forest.

For a moment, the smoke that filled half the sky split and sunlight appeared. In an instant, it was gone and the charcoal smoke drowned the blue sky.

"We can't catch a break, man" said Vern James, 29, a U.S. Forest Service assistant engineer. "It's going to hit this whole range."

James shook his head and took a drag from a cigarette. His helmet and jacket were covered in dried fire retardant, burgundy-colored evidence that he had been in some dicey situations. It meant a tanker plane had dropped at least one load of the anti-fire substance on an area where he was standing.

Like James, John Boehm lives in Twin Peaks and works for the forest service. Both are swash-buckler sorts of guys, ruggedly handsome, the type who love their jobs so much they think nothing of working 45 hours in a 48-hour stretch. But at the moment, both watched the fire solemnly.

"It just gets frustrating," said Boehm, 27, pointing in the direction of his home two miles away.

More battles ahead

As the flames advanced, the firefighters climbed in and out of their engines and trucks several times, each time hoping the blaze had finished its early morning run down the highway. But those winds cajoled the flames onward, nearly all the way to Running Springs.

As several crews readied to defend a handful of houses near the eye of the blaze, firefighters received their first bit of good fortune in what seemed an eternity. The fire had stopped advancing along the highway and instead thrust onward into mainly forested land.

By 7:30 a.m., the winds subsided. Most of the fire had passed over and around the sand yard, and the smoke began clearing to allow visibility of 10 to 20 feet. Most of Hultquist's crews drove west toward Skyforest. Hultquist turned east on Highway 18 and drove more than a mile and a half, checking evidence of the fire's passage.

Blackened branches and shadows of charred trees loomed out of a dense fog of smoke and ash. Thick, wooden guardrail pilings on the downhill side of the road burned like candlesticks. The truck's tires crunched over firebrands carpeting the road and the carcasses of dozens of rats and rabbits. To the north, a thunderhead of smoke billowed thousands of feet overhead.

When the truck emerged from the tunnel of smoke into clear air, Hultquist shook hands with a departing passenger and headed for Lake Arrowhead. He hadn't slept in 28 hours. A hard day in the mountains was far from over.

Gusting winds continued driving the bulk of the fire northeast into dense forest, bypassing the eastern-most homes of Lake Arrowhead. But fire commanders up and down Highway 18 and in east Lake Arrowhead remained concerned about the possibility of shifting winds, as well as lingering pockets of fire to the southeast caused by Tuesday's back-firing.

By 10:30 a.m., 17 engines and their crews waited in the parking lot of a shopping center on Hook Creek Road in Cedar Glen. Firefighters would have to let the forest burn, but they intended to defend dozens of homes in the area if necessary.

By noon, commanders' worst fears proved correct: Homes were on fire in Cedar Glen, a canyon community nestled on the east side of Lake Arrowhead. And as the day would later show, it was only the beginning.

Reach Guy McCarthy at (909) 567-2408 or gmccarthy@pe.com. Reach George Watson at (909) 368-9457 or gwatson@pe.com