View from Booth Hill

There are several reasons for posting this photo, taken from the top of Booth Hill, the highest point in our area at 898 meters.

The first reason has to do with the wildfire, the Gray Fire, that destroyed so many acres and homes here recently. The facility in the foreground is Lakeland Village, a residential home for handicapped persons and the place our son lives. The fire, as is evident from the photo, burned right up to Lakeland, but the firefighters managed to prevent the fire from burning any of the buildings on the grounds. The fire then burned to the left of the photo and into the city of Medical Lake destroying many homes.

The second reason for posting this is that we learned in connection with the fire that buildings at the top of the hill, almost all of which were destroyed by the fire, were part of an old Nike surface-to-air missile site, built during the Cold War. The missiles were sited there to protect nearby Fairchild Air Force Base, still operational and for that reason the ill is also known as Nike Hill. Though the site has long been abandoned by the military, the buildings were still in use by the family that owned the property and used it to restore and sell old cars.