The mountain just outside of town where my mother lives is on fire. Last night she said her hubby was out looking at the blaze (hopefully from a safe distance) which had left the town covered with ash Tuesday morning and blackened the sky the rest of the day. This morning, the fire made the Times.

CASPER, Wyo., Aug. 15 — Thousands of residents were evacuated on Tuesday as a fast-growing wildfire, ignited Monday by a lightning strike, threatened high-altitude homes and populous subdivisions.

More than 8,000 acres had burned by early evening on Tuesday as the fire swept across Casper Mountain, a heavily forested peak of more than 8,000 feet just south of Casper. It is dotted with an estimated 800 homes, 150 of them year-round residences.

The fire then swept down the mountain toward subdivisions west of the city, which has about 50,000 residents, officials said. One mountain home had burned as of late Tuesday afternoon, and more than 300 were threatened on the mountain’s top and north slope. . . .

On Tuesday, two helicopters and two slurry bombers were assisting the firefighters, and any fire trucks that could be spared were rushed to the fire.

Earth graders, bulldozers and old military vehicles were also pressed into service, as were large tank trucks that hauled water from hydrants at the base of the mountain to fire trucks on top. . . .

[Stacey Scott's] son, Joe, drove to view the fire on Monday night and described the scene: “There was a line of fire nearly a mile long of burning sage with flames 7 to 15 feet high. I was a mile away, and we could hear the roar. At first we thought it was a helicopter. Then we realized we were listening to the fire. . . .”

The topography of our mountain and its foothills makes this fire especially bad. This Google map shows where I used to live. The fire is burning on the top and northwest sides of the mountain (at the bottom left of the map). The wind blows from the south and west, which is pushing it across grass and sage land toward the city without any real barriers to its progress. In a normal year, the vegetation is as dry as kindling in August, but my mother says this has been a drier and hotter summer than normal.