The Timber Fire cut the single access road to the Big Sur Condor Sanctuary, stranding two lead-poisoning-recovery condors — numbered 868 and 340 — for days without fresh food or water. On Tuesday, a Cal Fire escort let a Ventana Wildlife Society biologist reach the pen and release them.

For four days the two condors had nothing but dirty water. Numbered 868 and 340, the birds were being held in a recovery pen at the Big Sur Condor Sanctuary — both had just come through treatment for lead poisoning at the Oakland and Los Angeles zoos — when the Timber Fire broke out Saturday night and swallowed the single road that leads up to their enclosure. Ventana Wildlife Society staff, who had last refreshed the food and water about four days earlier, could no longer get to them.

"They were trapped, essentially," Kelly Sorenson, the society's executive director, told KQED. Earlier, he had told the San Francisco Chronicle the water still in the pen was "all dirty water," and that if fire crews couldn't escort a staffer up, the plan was to hike in — "pretty dangerous and difficult," he said.

It didn't come to that. On Tuesday afternoon, Cal Fire escorted the society's senior wildlife biologist, Joe Burnett, up the burned road to the pen, and he opened it. "Both condors, just recovered from lead poisoning thanks to the Oakland and Los Angeles Zoos, flew off well and are back where they belong," the Ventana Wildlife Society posted afterward.

The sanctuary sits inside the Ventana Wilderness, more than 100,000 acres of the Los Padres National Forest, and it has spent three decades rebuilding a bird that nearly vanished. Roughly 600 California condors now exist worldwide, up from 27 in the 1980s, per the society; about 106 fly wild across central California, from Big Sur down into San Luis Obispo and San Benito counties and over Pinnacles National Park.

Fire is the standing threat to that math. In 2020, the Dolan Fire — which ignited about a mile from this same sanctuary and burned more than 125,000 acres — killed a dozen condors, two of them chicks. "What's really devastating is the size, the intensity and the frequency," Sorenson said. This week, the count held: two birds back on the ridge, and the road behind them still smoking.