Like many before it, the wildfire was conceived on a late summer afternoon as a drifting monsoonal cell bunched up, gathered its energy, and raked over the mountainous uplift, all the while spewing hard rain, wind, and lightning. The neighborhood it was born in was both rough and beautiful; the mountain formed minor peaks, valleys, and draws that spilled down from the ridges into deeper cuts and steeper slopes as the watercourses worked ever downward and outward toward the Pacific Northwest coastline.