Perimeter, evacuation area at Lake Hughes

A wildfire that began Wednesday afternoon in the mountains north of Los Angeles quickly grew to 13,000 acres, forcing the evacuation of the Lake Hughes community.

The Lake Fire was reported Wednesday at 3:40 a.m. off Lake Hughes Road in Prospect Canyon, north of Castaic Lake, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said. The cause of this is being investigated.

The fire spread rapidly to the northeast, growing in just under two hours to 7,000 acres. It crosses both Lake Hughes Road and Pine Canyon Road, and threatens homes on the edge of the Antelope Valley. The rising cloud of smoke could be seen from beaches of Orange County 75 miles away.

The red line on the map above shows the approximate perimeter on Thursday morning, as released by the Angeles National Forest.

The forest report at 7 a.m. Thursday set the size at 10,500 acres (16 square miles) without containment; the card that was released at midnight burned the area to about 12,800 acres. Three structures were destroyed, and more than 5,000 were threatened.

Updates on evacuation orders can be found at the Twitter feed of the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Checkpoints where Red Cross staff assess the needs of evacuees have been set up at Highland High School in Palmdale and the Castaic Sports Complex.

The fire blocked the Pacific Crest Trail, the Mexico-Canada hiking trail. A more southerly part of the track was closed for two weeks by the Apple Fire, northwest of Palm Springs.

Firefighters were protected Thursday from humid weather: balmy winds, mid-1990s temperatures and humidity of 10% or lower. The crew’s goal for the day was, according to the National Forest’s morning report, to keep the fire north of Castaic Lake, south of Highway 138, east of Redrock Mountain and west of Tule Ridge.

The fire is burning in an area that has not seen a major fire in nearly 100 years, and the abundance of fuel was a contributing factor to its explosive growth.

At the beginning of the month, the National Forest increased its level of fire danger to “extreme” and banned campfires, stoves and shooting until February.