A small wildfire broke out late this afternoon on Los Alamos National Laboratory property, about 3 miles in a straight line from my house. Ever since the Cerro Grande Fire in 2000, everyone around here is quite jumpy about any smoke in the county. I drove out to see where this was, precisely, and it was in Ancho Canyon beyind TA-39 (a name for a location on LANL property). There were fire trucks and activity on the mesa across from State Road 4 about a half mile east of the entrance to Bandelier National Monument.
I managed to take a couple of pictures of the slurry bomber making a couple of passes with a hand held 200mm lens from the balcony off of the bedroom of my house.
At one point there were 3 planes in the sky. What looked like a National Forrest Service aircraft flying high overhead monitoring the situation, a small pilot plane making multiple passes through the smoke presumably to map out paths for the larger slurry bomber to take, and the slurry bomber.
By the time I got my larger lens out, the slurry bomber was headed back for Albuquerque. The helicopter with the water bucket at the top of this post and the one below were taken with a longer tripod mounted lens from the same location.
The fire seems to have quieted down now, thanks to the quick action of the firemen on the ground and in the air.
