THE NEW YORK TIMES - The snow-blanketed peaks, fishing holes and cool alpine air of the San Bernardino Mountains have beckoned Southern Californians for generations. As far back as the 1880s, travelers braved a 6,000-foot climb in horse-drawn carriages to reach the pine forests that now surround the resort towns of Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear.
High in “the Alps of Southern California,” about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, vacationers would bathe in hot springs, hunt deer, hike to waterfalls and, primarily, escape the troubles of city life. In 1909, The San Bernardino County Sun observed that in the mountains, where the sky is a clear azure and songbirds never quiet, “all is peace and beauty.”
Not so in the 2020s.
The San Bernardino Mountains still draw millions of tourists annually, but the 50,000 full-time residents are increasingly besieged by crises.
This week, locals are returning home after a fast-moving wildfire forced widespread evacuations and scorched 61 square miles of the landscape. Some fleeing residents took refuge in the same hotels where they had stayed last year, when a deadly snowstorm collapsed roofs, blocked exit routes and cut off power for days.
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Richard Minnich, a professor at the University of California, Riverside, who studies fire in the San Bernardino Mountains, said that a century of suppressing even the smallest of blazes had left behind excess vegetation that was primed to burn and could create larger and more destructive fires over time. Warmer weather, one of the effects of climate change, is drying out the land at a faster pace and turning plants into prime tinder.
“People want to live with nature, but they don’t recognize that nature is explosively flammable,” Mr. Minnich said.