(alarm blaring) - [Sheriff] Due to the expansion of the Creek Fire emergency evacuation ordered in this area.

(alarm blaring) (somber music) - [Woman] There's the fire.

You can see the smoke in the air, all the little pieces of particulate matter.

We put all of explosives away from our house, and we have our car over here, that's packed and ready to go.

- [Jeff] On Labor Day weekend, 2020, one of the largest wildfires in California's history exploded in the Sierra Nevada mountains above Fresno.

- [Man] There's a gas station.

They don't have any fuel left though.

- The Creek Fire roared through bone dry forests, pushed by strong winds and temperatures nearing 100 degrees on Saturday, September 5th.

Jumping the San Joaquin River, from it's ignition point just below Big Creek, California and running an astonishing 15 miles to the north in four hours.

One of the fastest and largest wildfire spread rates ever recorded.

It left behind a scorched landscape, in some places as far as the eye can see, and torched one of the Sierra National Forests' top attractions, the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

When you come around the corner here and you get up onto the edge of a Peckinpah Ridge here and you see for the first time, the wide expanse of burn scar from the Creek Fire, and it's sobering.

It is sobering.

But this route that leads travelers into the heart of one of the most scenic stretches of the Sierra National Forest is now a place for opportunity and growth for both the plants and trees emerging from the ashes and for people to better understand how wildfire and these landscapes interact.

There's an interesting mix here of white and blue oaks, that are starting to come in with their foliage.

And then there's oaks that are not gonna have foliage ever come back.

It's also an opportunity for capturing dramatic images of a natural setting, changed by fire, but still capable of revealing beauty when we learn how to see in a different way.

I don't want people to think because the Creek Fire burned up a large part of the terrain that the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway goes through, that you shouldn't come here and see this.

You actually should come here and see this.

We should come here and learn about fire and also appreciate the new way of looking at the forest here.

So I always try to look at something like this in a 'glass half full' sort of scenario.

And this is what we're trying to do today, is try to understand the changes that fire can bring to a forest like this, but still be able to enjoy a wonderful drive, like the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

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(gentle music) - It started in a canyon, below Big Creek, California on a quiet Friday night, as Labor Day weekend, 2020 was beginning.

One wisp of smoke rising from a single point on earth, that would explode the next day and send thousands of people scrambling for safety, some literally running for their lives.

The next day, Saturday, September 5th, I woke up to local news reports of another California wildfire, like many I've seen before.

This one, given the name, the Creek Fire by agencies that would be fighting it.

But this fire had a very distinct difference for me.

It was burning in my own backyard.

The forests in places I had grown up exploring as a boy were on fire now.

Homes and cabins of friends were being destroyed.

Livestock of ranchers, I know, in their usual summer grazing areas, were lost.

By 1:00 on Saturday afternoon, I knew this one was bad.

Still, as serious as the situation looked with the Creek Fires, massive pyro cumulus cloud towering thousands of feet into the atmosphere that day, I never thought it would jump the San Joaquin River into Madera County and spread towards where we were headed for the weekend at our friend's cabin in Beasore Meadows.

When we got there, I saw a sky like I've never seen before.

Thick black smoke, bellowing above.

A constant rumble of thunder caused by the pyro clouds.

Huge smoking chunks of bark and wood raining down everywhere.

And then word that the Creek Fire did in fact, jump the river, and had burned nearly 15 miles in just a few hours, directly toward where my family and I were preparing to camp for the night.

Okay, it is almost 7:00, and we've just gotten the evacuation order to evacuate Beasore Meadows.

The cabin is back there and the sky is looking pretty gnarly.

It doesn't seem like the fire's close, but the smoke's been getting worse and the sky is pretty angry and red and gnarly looking.

And we're getting reports that people down in Mammoth Pool are having a tough time and maybe even jumping in the river to save themselves from the fire.

So, the sheriff went through the neighborhood here and just ran the siren and said, get on out.

So we are on our way down after spending two days of prepping food and packing and getting up here.

Good ole 2020.

(fire crackling) Like so many those first days, I was astonished at how far and fast the Creek Fire spread.

Every hour another evacuation order.

As the initial shock of the Creek Fire began to settle into realization, that this was going to be a historic and widespread event, the days and months of adjusting to smoke-filled skies and a blanket of ash on everything began.

- If this was a normal Labor Day weekend, there'd be cars lining every inch of the road.

There's not a single car in sight.

It's crazy how much ash there is blanketing the entire lake.

It's also weird how peaceful it feels out here.

(gentle music) - The Creek Fire was finally declared 100% contained on December 24th, 2020.

It burned 379,895 acres.

Most of it in the Sierra National Forest.

(helicopter blades whirring) Hundreds were rescued by National Guard helicopters on the night of September 5th, trapped near Mammoth Pool Reservoir.

With tens of thousands more evacuated from their homes for weeks.

The fire wasn't directly related to any fatalities, which is still amazing to me.

But 12 campers and 14 firefighters suffered injuries, some serious.

The Creek Fire destroyed at least 856 buildings, including half of the homes in Big Creek, California.

And cost taxpayers nearly $200 million in fire suppression costs.

As of spring 2021, the cause of the fire is still officially under investigation.

For this story I'm not going into the politically charged debate over what is causing these mega-fires in the West.

There will be another time for that.

Climate change, forest management practices, the decline of the timber industry.

They're all components in this complex issue.

In this episode, I want to focus on a specific part of the Sierra National Forest that was hit hard by the Creek Fire because it's long been one of my favorite ways to enjoy this special and unique mountain range in California.

(water rushing) It's been a perfect access point to photographic adventures, fishing trips and camp outs with friends.

And is a journey that starts right smack dab in the middle of California, literally.

In the awesome little town of North Fork.

All right, so we've got the battle van pulled over here.

We're in North Fork, California, which is really cool, because this is technically the geographic center of California.

This is also where the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway unofficially begins, if you're doing this route.

And so what I like to recommend on this route, you can go either direction, I like starting from North Fork.

I want to explore how there's still a way to appreciate and enjoy a scenic byway, even though much of the land that byway goes through has been burned by wildfire.

And I want to try to capture and appreciate the fact that the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway is still a beautiful place to come and still worthy of a trip here to Central California and Eastern Madera County.

To capture footage for this episode, we broke up the shoot into various days of filming.

You'll see some shots that Zack Allen and David Boomer pooled without me and then shots we all captured together on this run.

And a few at the end that I got by myself.

For now it's time to climb out of North Fork and get this drive on the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway started.

Okay, taking a quick stop here on Mammoth Pool Road, also known as the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

One of the things you'll notice, once you get out of North Fork, doesn't take long to get out of North Fork.

And then you come up and you have this tremendous view below of Redinger Lake, which is a damned up portion of the San Joaquin River.

I don't want people to think because the Creek Fire burned up a large part of the terrain that the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway goes through, that you shouldn't come here and see this.

You actually should come here and see this.

We should come here and learn about fire and also appreciate the new way of looking at the forest here.

The fire burned hundreds of thousands, if not millions of large trees and opened up views that you've never had before.

So I always try to look at something like this in a 'glass half full' sort of scenario.

And this is what we're trying to do today, is try to understand the changes that fire can bring to a forest like this, but still be able to enjoy a wonderful drive, like the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

(gentle music) The complete route of the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway is about 100 miles long, winding through, what I think is some of the best scenery in the entire Sierra Nevada range.

Parts of this route are closed in winter and early spring due to snow.

And because of the Creek Fire, bridge repairs and some road repair may be ongoing.

So it's a good idea to check the byways website before setting out.

It's also the best place to see a detailed map of the entire byway route.

When you come around corner here and you get up onto the edge of a Peckinpah Ridge here, and you see for the first time the wide expanse of burn scar from the Creek Fire and it's sobering.

It is sobering.

See I've been up here a couple of times since the fire burned and I'm already seeing a lot of signs of renewal and regrowth, which is what happens.

It's great to see when it finally happens.

It's amazing to me, how fast the fire spread.

What we're looking at right now, is actually day two of the fire.

So day two of the fire, jumped the San Joaquin River, down by Jose Basin behind us, and then burned up to the top of Peckinpah Ridge where kinda we are here, where the Mammoth Pool Road comes in.

Then went north and east towards Mammoth Pool.

We're seeing some great signs of the forest here starting to come back.

So let's get out here and check this out.

What do you say, Zack?

- Yeah, lets do it.

- You want to do it?

- Yeah, let's go.

- Dave's already out, right?

- Ready.

- Okay, let's do this.

(inspiring music) Eight months after the Creek Fire roared through this landscape, life is returning, as it always does after a wildfire.

On this hillside, along the byway drive, black oaks emerge from the ashes to start a new cycle in the shadows of the charred parent trees that gave them life.

There is some comfort in knowing that this landscape will one day hide the clues of what happened here.

The tough part is coming to peace with the fact that this won't happen in our lifetime.

It will be something future generations will enjoy.

What lens do you have on here, Zack?

- I got the 100-400 on.

- 100-400.

We're all shooting on Sony a7S-III's now, and this is a 100-400 Sony G-Master lens, if you guys are camera nerds, like us.

- This is the a-I, actually, I forgot.

- This is the a-I, the Sony a-I body, so this is really super fancy.

Pulled over real quick because the weather is now becoming part of the story here on our shoot today.

So as we're driving in, we're looking up into the San Joaquin River drainage, where the middle, north and south forks all converge, is right below that rock group that you see out there.

And you've got Jackass Rock, and Fuller Buttes and some of those rock features off there in the distance.

And we knew when we were driving up here today, Zack and I were driving up here today to pick up David and I was looking up over the Sierras from the San Joaquin valley below.

And we could see those lenticular clouds, you know those clouds that look like big UFO's?

We call them Sierra Wave clouds, or lenticular clouds.

That's a telltale sign that there's high winds up high in the atmosphere, ahead of a big storm system like this.

So I wanted to pull over here real quick and try to document it, get some shots of this dramatic landscape that's happening right now as the weather and the land work together here to make this pretty cool setting for us right now.

(gentle inspiring music) Deeper into the mountains, along the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway, we finally met the approaching storm we were shooting a few miles back.

Look at the snow.

Right now we've got snow coming down, you guys.

- This is probably 5,000, you think we're above 5,000?

- yeah, about 5,000 feet.

- Here it comes.

- Yeah, maybe get a camera on that, Zack.

I'm just saying we shoot a little travel show, maybe a camera on it might be cool.

- [Zack] Oh, look at that!

- And just like that, man, it's coming.

So we're gonna have to watch that today, because we're gonna drop down in elevation right now We're still up pretty high right now, like Dave said, around 5,000 feet.

We're gonna drop down below that, down into the Mammoth Pool Basin.

And then we're gonna climb all the way back up to like 7,000 feet.

So we've gotta kinda watch accumulation for snow today.

The battle van is four-wheel drive and the tires aren't great on her right now, but I think they can still get the job done.

The Sierra Vista Scenic Byway is a beautiful drive and I don't care what the weather's doing outside.

I don't care if the forest has burned all down around it I'm enjoying myself.

I think you will too if you come out here and try to appreciate what's happened here, instead of looking at it from a point of devastation, which for a lot of people it is.

It's still a natural thing that happened and it is a process that these forests go under and through for the millennia.

Forests burn and they regrow and they burn and they regrow, and this is what they do.

So I think coming here and enjoying this drive and just changing your expectation on the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway is a good piece of advice.

The Creek Fire started under the worst of coincidences, hot, dry, windy conditions on a busy Labor Day weekend, in the year of COVID when everyone had been locked up all summer.

Thousands were in these mountains just beginning a three-day weekend of camping, boating and hiking in the Sierra National Forest.

Signs of how fast the flame spread on Saturday, September 5th, can still be seen nine months after the firestorm raced through the Whiskey Ridge section of the Byway Drive.

One of the highlights of the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway is a pull-over with world-class views of the San Joaquin River drainage, where all three forks of the river converge above Mammoth Pool, the Mile High Overlook.

(upbeat music) A little chilly, eh Zack?

- Yeah, that peaked quick.

(Jeff laughing) - But for us now getting hammered by high winds, freezing temps and driving snow, Mile High is a tough place to shoot.

Using the battle van as a wind block, Zack is dead set on burning a time-lapse shot here, which means we're staying put for about an hour.

Plans are in place to fully restore this popular stop and repair fire damage to interp signs and facilities here.

Even if doing the full byway loop drive is too much to bite off for you, driving to Mile High and taking in the incredible views is a worthy payoff to this journey.

For us the payoff of filming in wintery conditions is another Zack Allen time-lapse classic of the storm from Mile High Vista that tells the visual story of this day in the Sierra.

(uplifting inspiring music) As the drive drops into the Mammoth Pool Basin, more signs of a forest beginning to recover are found.

Lupine blooms against a backdrop of blackened sticks, once a lush stand of pines.

A small creek bed becomes a foothold for life and growth, in a scar of what the Creek Fire left behind.

On our climb out of the Mammoth Pool area, as we gain in elevation, the storm has worsened and now blackened forests are turning white.

All right, well, we have reached a point where we've made a decision to turn around.

The byway is climbing in altitude right now, we're between 6 and 7,000 feet right now.

And the snow is really starting to stick and it's not slowing down.

It's just steady, coming down pretty hard.

But in a situation like this, where we have snow falling and we have a lot more altitude to gain, it's not a smart play for us right now.

So we're gonna go back down towards Mammoth Pool Road and we're gonna take Grizzly Road, which is a nice little cut road, like a shortcut road, between Mammoth Pool Road and Beasore Road.

It takes the whole loop out of play, but it's still a beautiful alternate route to the drive and the experience back here in this basin, and for us right now, as the snow really starts to stick to the ground, we need to get up in altitude and over the summit.

So we're going downhill before the snow really starts to stick to the road.

(slow gentle music) The stubborn storm was actually a blessing in disguise.

We were able to climb out on Grizzly Road and grab some snowy scenes like this, before joining up with Beasore Road and eventually making it down to Bass Lake.

But the following week I came back up by myself in much better weather to scope out the part of the byway that we couldn't make.

At Chiquito Creek, the new bridge under construction, is still under construction.

The Creek Fire forced crews here to evacuate and a lot of work remains.

So using Grizzly Road up to Beasore Road from Mammoth Pool will be what we suggest for the alternate Sierra Vista Scenic Byway route until this bridge is completed.

And once you're up on this part of the route just above the Creek Fires northern reach, forests are unburned and thriving.

Just a few hundred yards from a scorched forest, unique stops like Globe Rock, a giant, almost perfectly round granite boulder, sitting on a pedestal, has been a place of interest for a long time.

The Mono tribes of Native Americans gathered here to grind acorns and even President Teddy Roosevelt had his picture taken below this rare rock feature.

Just up the route from the intersection of Grizzly and Beasore Roads, the only stop along the byway drive to grab some food and a cold drink is the historic Jones's Store at Beasore Meadows.

- [Waitress] How many beers guys?

One soda?

- One, two, three, four.

Four beers.

- Five beers.

- Five beers?

- Five beers.

- [Jeff] This place has a centuries old history behind it and is known locally for it's incredible cheeseburgers, cooked up on an old, seasoned flat top in the kitchen.

Enjoying something cold to drink while eating lunch out in the high country air with friends is a great part of the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway experience.

(men gasping) - [Man] It's apple pie a la mode.

- [Woman] Pass it around here, mister.

- [Jeff] At Cold Springs Summit, just up the road from Jones's Store, you can go straight back down to Bass Lake, or take a right for an off pavement run down to Sky Ranch Road and back out to the town of Oakhurst.

Here, the forests are still healthy, lush and mostly free of signs of fire.

- I love being able to just hear the wind, the birds, the water.

I love how peaceful it is out here at this point in time.

I love the fact that it's close enough to Yosemite, but remote enough so that you can avoid the large crowds.

- [Jeff] Taking a few minutes to pull over, get out of the car and appreciate the smaller scenes of beauty, like these Western Wallflowers, blooming in the late spring sun, remind me of the contrast you can experience on the byway drive.

The Creek Fire changed a large part of the central Sierra Nevada mountains in California and the experience of the Sierra Vista Scenic Byway.

But those changes shouldn't deter you from coming here.

The byway is now one of the best ways to see the effects of large wildfires up close and to witness the rebirth that happens in their aftermath.

And in a one day round trip, you can literally pass through landscapes like this and end your day with a view that reminds us all that doing more and doing better to preserve our forests and protect them from wildfire is something we all need to quickly learn how to do together.

(birds chirping) (gentle orchestral music) ♪ I've changed my mind ♪ ♪ I'm not going back there ♪ ♪ I just don't fit right ♪ ♪ And when I do I feel something ♪ (low gentle music) - [Announcer] "Outside Beyond the Lens" brought to you by, Visit Fresno County, nature, diversity, found in the heart of California Central Valley.

Stay in Fresno or Clovis and drive to three nearby national parks.

By Hedrick's Chevrolet.

Supporting the spirit of travel in each of us.

Every journey has a first step.

Start your next adventure here.

By Fresno Yosemite International Airport.

Rediscover your love for travel with more options, more flights, more connecting you to the people and the places you love.

And by Visit Yosemite Madera County, California's gateway to Yosemite National Park.

Explore the outdoor magic of Madera County and be inspired to discover more.

And by viewers like you.

(plane engine roaring) (bright music)