Thousands of Californians forced from their neighborhoods by this week's wind-whipped wildfires returned home on Friday, some of them finding their property unscathed amid the destruction and others discovering nothing but blackened rubble.
In San Diego County, where an estimated 500,000 people fled the smoke and flames in the largest mass evacuation in modern California history, lines of cars streamed back into fire-scarred mountain communities that had been left ghost towns.
Traffic was jammed for miles as weary residents made their way one at a time past police checkpoints. In some neighborhoods the hop-scotching fires left a single home standing while burning everything else to the ground.
The wildfires have killed at least 12 people over some 800 square miles of Southern California and have destroyed 2,000 homes and other structures. Losses are expected to top $1 billion in hard-hit San Diego County alone.
The few hundred remaining people in the largest emergency shelter - San Diego's Qualcomm sports stadium - were being moved to several smaller centers.
Stores in the deserted communities began to reopen, some with signs in their windows thanking firefighters for their efforts. Crews removed fallen trees and repaired phone lines that were blown down by the high winds.
After six days of relentless blazes from Los Angeles south to the Mexican border, most of the raging fires had either been doused or brought under relative control as the emergency turned to the long business of recovery.