“I'm pretty glad to see you guys made it.”ĭharma, Jeb, and Jason had no way of knowing it yet, but the fire they'd driven into would soon register as the deadliest and most destructive in California's history. “Grab a shovel or grab something,” Sam told them. Near the Steel Bridge, the men found Sam cutting down a fence with a chain saw. When Jason nosed his truck over the rim, he and the others discovered that Sam wasn't wrong: Fires were burning on both sides of the road, all the way down. From where he stood, he could see the road, too. “I think we can get down there,” Jason told Sam, studying the route that descended the canyon wall. But seeing him down on the canyon floor made an otherwise impossible decision easy. None of them had expected to discover a close friend fighting an uncontrolled fire all alone.įrom the top of Center Gap, Sam's efforts looked quixotic, possibly crazy. At worst, they'd at least be present to watch Helltown burn.
Paradise fire dogs free#
At best, they figured, the rumor they'd heard would prove untrue, and they'd be able to slip back into the canyon to set free the horses and other animals their families left behind during their hasty evacuations.
“All gone.”ĭharma, Jason, and Jeb had come up to the top of Center Gap uncertain about what they'd find. “It's gone,” they told one another, though they could each see very well for themselves. From this vantage point, it looked like the canyon as they knew it had been obliterated. Repeating the exercise all along the creek, they looked for their parents' houses in Helltown, for the place in neighboring Centerville where Jeb lived with his daughter, and for the cemetery where Dharma had buried his wife after a car accident in 2012. But when they figured out where his house should be, they saw only a pall of black smoke. In front of them was the Steel Bridge, a local landmark not far from where Jason lived with his wife, Maria, who was also Dharma's sister, and their four children. With the power out, the fires in the canyon offered the only illumination for miles, but the burning shrubs of manzanita and bottlebrush, and the booms of propane tanks exploding like distant artillery, helped the men orient themselves within the crumpled terrain. Taking backroads in Jason's truck, the three men had driven to the canyon rim, at the top of a rugged dirt track called Center Gap Road, after hearing a rumor that the 20 or so houses that composed Helltown were soon to go.Įxhausted but undaunted, Dharma LaRocca, Jason McCord, and Jeb Sisk pose for a photo that was later shared widely among those who'd evacuated the canyon-and were cheering their friends from afar. Already it had consumed 20,000 acres, and it was now threatening homes in every direction. The fires in the canyon represented the leading edge of a conflagration that had been burning since early that morning. But as they watched the blaze curl like lava among the sycamores and hundred-year-old cottonwoods, they couldn't help imagining they were someplace faraway and exotic. Now in their 40s, the men knew the territory better than anyplace else on earth. Dharma LaRocca, Jeb Sisk, and Jason McCord had grown up down there, in a hippie community called Helltown that had once been a gold-mining camp. It was a dark night in early November, a new moon, and as the three friends looked out from the dusty rim of Butte Creek Canyon, in the foothills just outside Chico, California, they could see fires dotting the whole length of the landscape at their feet.
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