Photo quiz: What’s this?

What do think the object on the left is? (The chair is only in the photo for a sense of scale.)

It’s the aluminum engine block from an ATV that was destroyed in the Bastrop wildfire last summer.

Related post: Bastrop wildfire

5 thoughts on “Photo quiz: What’s this?

  1. My guess was correct, but I didn’t expect I’d ever use that particular bit of knowledge. That was one hot fire.

  2. Well the general type of material I guessed (wasn’t that hard, it’s obviously metal that was molten and solidified somewhere where it was spilled), but I didn’t guess the origin either.

    Is that yours or did you spot it somewhere else?

  3. I just got back from a father-daughter retreat run by the staff of the camp where the ATV was destroyed. They showed us the melted engine block as an example of the damage caused by the fire. They said the glass from the ATV also melted but they didn’t show us a sample.

  4. Interesting. I forwarded the link to a San Diego friend who went through the fires there, a couple of years ago. He returned a pic of a puddle of metal where his atv once was, though the steel rims of the wheels remained. Also a swirl pattern of what appeared to be pine needles – in reality the tire ” belts”. Incredible temperatures.

    Suddenly the aluminized Mylar “space blanket” I take hiking is less comforting.

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