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I recently returned from a five-day road trip to Southern California to check out the fires. By time, I arrived, most of the serious damage had already taken its toll on the area. That and the fact that I was by myself, led me to focus on the relief efforts put forth by our local guys.

On Saturday, I met up with two members from the local Red Cross chapter in Reno. They, drove up in an Emergency Response Vehicle and parked it in the lot beside the Petco Park baseball stadium in downtown San Diego, beside hundreds of others marked from as far away as St. Louis.

The scene outside Petco was chaotic, to say the least. Boxes of bottled water and spaghetti were surrounded by volunteers and people with clip boards ordering others around with seemingly nobody having a crystal clear idea about what exactly was going on. In their defense, there really is no way to prepare for something like this. Ideally, you'd think there would be a chain of command or something, but how can you expect people to develop that kind of coordination when they're cooperating with people they've never met before and consequently know absolutely nothing about? You can't plan for disasters of these proportions; when it hits, you throw some things into a suitcase and head over to help.

On Day One, our local guys ran a relief effort to one of the dozens of feeding areas at a nearby high school, then they packed up and headed home. They will be in the area for at least another two weeks. As we saw in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, the end of a natural disaster is just the beginning for the hundreds of  thousands of people victimized by its wrath.

On Sunday, I was fortunate enough to cross paths with a strike team featuring dozens of firefighters from the Truckee Meadows and all over Northern Nevada. These guys had the daunting task of working 24 hours straight and then taking 24 hours off, a completely unimaginable schedule loaded with inconsistencies.

This day, our guys saw little action, which is probably just as well for a crew clearly exhausted by a week long ordeal on the fire lines. One firefighter from Incline Village told me I should have been there on Thursday night when they got a firsthand look at the hellacious Witch and Poomacha fires.

I know good flames and destruction are sexier images, but I hope viewers understood the drama of these crews' sacrifice without those supplements.

In all, I decimated over 1500 miles; countless pots of coffee; and pounds of crappy junk food during my journey. I learned to use a new editing system and turned my rental Hyundai into a massive abyss of filthiness that would make any garbage dump jealous. Hopefully, all of that translated into something that could be considered a rational and informative story.