I’m just wandering what everyone has planned for the 4th of July this year. With it being on a Wed. it makes it a little hard to do much unless your taking some extra days off to play.

I have company showing up this evening. Tammy’s mom and dad and uncle will be here tonight. Her uncle will stay until Tuesday or Wednesday, here mom and dad will most likely be here until next weekend. I also have my cousin Norm coming up tomorrow to go do some fishing. His two boys are coming with him. They are here until Tuesday. So I’m going to be a pretty busy boy for the next week.

I’ll try to keep things updated here, but if I don’t get any post up you know why.

I hope we can get through this 4th without to many boneheads starting fires in the mountains. I’m a little worried about it myself. Let’s just hope that everyone is very careful with their campfires and please don’t bring any fireworks into the mountains. Let’s all have a fire safe 4th.

The Angora fire is now %70 contained. The winds never showed up yesterday and the fire officials are now saying that the fire is under control. A third of the fire fighters have been sent home as the rest continue the mop up efforts. They now know the cause of the fire but aren’t telling us until this afternoon.

The White fire is now %65 contained and has grown to over 12,000 acres. They say the cause was human and believe that ATVers in the area may have started the fire.

The fire in Yosemite yesterday was a prescribed burn. Seems to me like a horrible time to be doing any burning in the valley, but I guess other than filling the valley with smoke, everything went ok.

I hate to say that there is anything positive about the Angora Fire, but for SierraVisions it’s been pretty amazing what’s happened since Monday. My visitors have tripled this week. Most of the visitors are going to the cams page and it’s the cams page that’s drawing in most of search engine traffic. But when I look at my page view stats I’m blown away. People aren’t just going to the cams page and leaving, they are checking out the whole site. My page views are 4x greater than average. This is so different than on the old site. We have huge days in the winter when there’s a big storm and everyone is checking out the cams, but that’s all they would check out. They wouldn’t go to the rest of the site. But with this new layout it seems like it’s drawing people to check out the journal post too.

Another cool thing that’s happened is that when people are searching for the fire on Google, SierraVisions is right at the top of the search results. That never happened on the old site.

I kind of feel strange about the site profiting from this tragic event, but I guess I’m providing a service for people to get information on the fire and that’s a good thing. I do hope that all of these new visitors like what they see here and maybe will become fans of the site.

If you look at the Yosemite Cams this morning it look like there is a fire near the valley. The Turtle Back Dome Cam has a lot of smoke billowing up. I don’t have any info on this. I just did a search of the fire sites and on Google News and so far there isn’t anything about it.

If anyone out there has any information or hears anything about this fire please leave a comment for us. I will keep a close eye on things today.

On the Lake Tahoe front, there is a lot of concern about the wind kicking up today. The fire is right on the edge of town and today could be a bad day. The LA Times has an article about today’s worries. You can read it at this link:

Firefighters added in Tahoe as wind worries pick up