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Although strong, unpredictable winds made the Ranch fire dangerous and difficult to fight, local firefighters said they have seen worse fires.

Once the high winds that drove the fire died down Tuesday night, firefighters were able to quickly beat back the blaze. Most of the flames were out by Wednesday, and Firefighters had cut firebreaks around at least 70 percent of the burned area by Wednesday.

The 54,716 acres burned by the Ranch fire are steep and rugged terrain. Like many of California's fire-prone areas, the more than 51,000 acres burned by the Ranch Fire are steep and rugged. But unlike the blazes that firefighters called the toughest to fight, the brush that fueled the Ranch fire was relatively light.

"This exact fire — at least on this end — is fairly routine," saidVentura County Fire Capt. Fred Burris said.

"The Day fire was really challenging because it was mostly wilderness," said Burris, who met with Hotshots"hot shot" crews at a Fillmore park Wednesday to discuss the day's plan of attack.

The 2006 Day fire and this year's Zaca fire burned large swaths of Los Padres National Forest, including some areas that hadn't burned in as muchmany as 100 years. The combination of abundant fuel and the fires' remote locations made them extremely difficult to fight, Burris said.

Much of the Ranch fire, at least on the Fillmore side, burned near rural farmland that had seen fire recently, so the brush was comparatively light, Burris said. Firefighters battling the Ranch fire were able to drive engines up roads near the blaze and bring in bulldozers to cut fire lines.

The lighter brush in the Ranch fire area also made it easier to mop up.

Near the Lake Piru dam, firefighters weren't finding many hot spots or smoldering embers on the fourth day of the fire. The ground was blackened where the fire had burned through light brush.

"It's not like your timber fires," which can smolder for as much as a week, said Art Tranberg, a safety officer for the Sierra National Forest, who has been fighting fires for 51 years.

"We're in pretty good shape here," Tranberg said as he looked out toward the dam.

But wWhile the Ranch fire wasn't the hardest blaze some California firefighters can remember, it wasn't a cakewalk either.

Limited resources and high winds that reduced visibility and sent the fire racing across the landscape made the Ranch fire challenging and hazardous, said Capt. Barry Parker, a spokesman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

The El Cariso Hotshots Crew arrived at the fire from Lake Elsinore on Sunday morning and worked for 32 hours straight because no other crews were available to replace them, said crew member Cyrus Galvan, 24.

At one point in the fire's first days, the wind was blowing about 70 mph and Galvan saw a halfmile stretch of hillside go up in flames in about a minute, he said. "It was too dangerous to do anything ... all we could do was protect structures," Galvan recalledsaid.

While the El Cariso crew was working to cut fire lines Tuesday in Violin Canyon in CastaicTuesday to keep the Ranch fire away from nearby homes, the wind changed direction and the crew had to run into a previously burned area to escape the flames, Galvan said. "We were running and the flames were at our backs."

The experience was a little scary, but Galvan had been in similar situations before during his year on the crew, he said. "When you go direct, stuff happens like that. ... You always have to have a safety zone.