Bay Area Family Campgrounds Burned in Rim Fire

Note: Hundreds of thousands of acres in Northern California are burning now, most noticeably the Rim Fire at Yosemite.
Visit the Rim Fire Facebook page for more details. Also click on the CalFire map for more information.

   BY BAY CITY NEWS SERVICE      
 
The Berkeley Tuolumne Family Camp, a city-owned camp that has operated near Yosemite since 1922, burned in the Rim Fire Sunday, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman has confirmed.

The wild fire, which had grown to 143,980 acres as of Sunday and was still only 7 percent contained, burned through the camp, located at 31585 Harden Flat Road near Groveland, according to forest service spokesman Dick Fleishman.

However, firefighters had not had a chance to go in and assess the damage as of Sunday, so it was unknown if any structures survived, Fleishman said.

Another Berkeley Camp, U.C Berkeley's Lair of the Bear, was not in the line of the fire despite rumors that it had burned down, Fleishman said.

Berkeley Tuolumne Family Camp was evacuated Tuesday along with other camps in the area including San Francisco Recreation and Parks' Camp Mather.
          
The fire spread to the very edges of Camp Mather, located at 35250 Mather Road near Groveland, this weekend and some minor damage was reported,
according to Phil Ginsburg, the city's director of Recreation and Parks.

However, no additional damage had been seen as of Sunday afternoon, and all structures remained intact, Ginsburg said in a statement released Sunday evening.

Two firefighting strike teams and a hand team are deployed at Camp Mather for structural defense, Ginsburg said.

Also evacuated earlier this week were the San Francisco-based Jewish summer camp Camp Tawonga, also located near Groveland, and the San Jose Family Camp in the Groveland area.

San Jose officials said on Saturday that fire crews were still defending structures within the city camp, which was only around 7 miles away from where the fire started.

As of Thursday, the fire had destroyed several tents on the camp's grounds, according to San Jose city officials.