Off to California:

First, apologies to Mark; he's been in the dark; had the wrong email written down.
This note, however, will ignore the fire as we are trying hard to do. Tomorrow we will drive to Carlsbad for a week at the Mariposa Hilton Grand Vacat Club for some R and R. Last week and into Tuesday took a lot out of us with this unbelievably huge and fast growing fire. Old Dad/UR got a little air time to boot, going on 2 TV stations in Phx and Tucson. Kind of interesting..
For an update, we did not get "the call", so we assume our cabin has not burned. The fire line is just feet from our front door it seems by a good map of the fire, and our valley appears out of the flames. Hope it's accurate!! We've had friends/acquaintances lose homes, and there's bound to be some extensive smoke damage, but we can deal with that. Cows are separated in two different pastures miles apart, horses in a third, but I'm not going back up now (been up twice) until they let us back into the area. Don't know when that will be, so why stay in Tucson and sit and worry when we can worry in Carlsbad?
Anyone know anything particular to do in San Diego? Looks like it'll be Susan and I in a 2 bed room penthouse for the bulk of it, then Erica will join us for the last 2-3 days or so, or at least that's the plan!
But, we are safe, animals I think are safe, now it's wait and see what the mountains have yet to offer.
Check out www.wunderground.com, search for Alpine, look for "wundermaps" on the right side in small print, scroll down to see "fire" box and check it, uncheck "smoke" or it's hard to see. Keep exploding it and you can see the area where our little ranch is/was..is hopefully!
Love t all, Dad/UR

Leaving

Well, the Wallow Fire is indeed bearing down upon us, Alpine has fire,
and the order had come down to evacuate Nutrioso. They have us about 3
hrs notice, @ 8 pm. Cows loaded and taken to Springerville, came back
for the horses. Saving what we can, leaving some precious things
behind. And away we go. Here's hoping and praying we can come back
soon. It is a very big and large wildfire.
Love to all, UR/Dad

Day 4, June 2

Well, howdy from the ranch: lots of stuff going on for sure.
Fence is up and running, found out we do not have 2 bull calves, rather we have one bull and one heifer! That's good news!
Bad news, we think one of the chickens is a rooster...uh oh.
We do have a problem brewing. You may have heard about the Wallow Fire, about 20 miles south of us now, about 16 miles south of Alpine. Well, our valley is and has been filled with smoke for a couple of days, and the wind keeps blowing, and it's 0% contained. We can't even see Escudilla for the smoke. Ash and soot actually blowing in our windows!
Please follow it with us @ www.inciweb.org, and follow the prompts. You can see a map and news of evacuations. Have to admit the people around here are getting a little nervous! We just need rain so bad, and it won't come until around the first week of July. This is not a good place to come visit right now for sure.
We are here until Sunday am, Chipman's coming over for supper tonight, and maybe the winds today will at least blow out some of this smoke!
Love to all, UR/Dad