Over this past weekend, I was riding in the Verdugos. The weather was supposed to hit the upper 90s, but the temperatures were holding to a reasonable lower 80s in the morning due to some cloud cover. So, I decided to stretch out and ride through the entire range, which got me thinking back to when it was last on fire in 2017.

The fire started in early September. I remember looking out the window with my (now) father-in-law when we saw the first burst of smoke. It wasn’t too far away, maybe five miles as the crow flies, and by nightfall, it looked like something out of a movie. The fire lasted around a week.

By November, the trails were open again. And I couldn’t help but be curious enough to ride through it again. It was an unreal landscape, looking like Mordor in large portions. It also really reinforced why the dirt roads were there to begin with — they’re called fire roads for a reason, I suppose.

Anyway, this seemed like as good a time as any to pull a photo from the archives to test out this new website, which, if you’re getting this in email, is now at thorinklosowski.com, or you can find it on both Bluesky and Mastodon (and supposedly Threads?).