Top of the World

My brother has been here so we can all brainstorm about the possibility of a second house on our property. There are a lot of questions, many of them unanswerable, but we have to discuss them. The primary one is how much longer any of us want to be here. We decided to drive up to the top of Los Alamos Road to check out the effect of the fire up there. John and I have been reluctant to risk running into a dump truck or a logging truck coming down as we were going up, but Rick wanted to have a look so we all piled into his car and he drove up.

The pictures tell the story better than I can. There were always a lot of houses tucked into the hills up there that weren't visible from the road. Despite the fact that the trees have all burned and we were stuck on the road for fifteen minutes waiting for them to load brush into a dump truck, there were still no houses visible from the road because they aren't there anymore...

All the pictures in the collage were taken at the top of the road at the entrance to the regional park, now closed indefinitely. Of particular interest were the high transmission power lines which look almost exactly the same as they always have. 

PG&E, the power company, announced yesterday that they plan to put 10,000 miles of power lines underground. Details were slim to none. I'm pretty skeptical....

Our realtor friend came this morning to discuss the idea of separating the lots, which doesn't sound difficult. Our contractor friend David is here right now to discuss the possibilities of building a small house up there, so  I'll go and join the discussion....