Letter From the Desert: the 2005 Hackberry Fire

I wrote this in Summer 2005 as I watched helplessly from my perch in the Bay Area while the Hackberry Fire burned more than 70,000 acres of the Mojave National Preserve. The first part describes events from 1997. This piece was first published in 2005 on my blog Creek Running North, no longer available online. So now it’s here.

Incinerated desert landsca…