Strength rises from the ashes

They know, because they've been through it. Twice.

Wildfires are a fact of life in Shasta County, where there are more than 1,500 square miles of forest and an average of 210 fires each year. But they've been especially devastating in the unincorporated community of Jones Valley. It was ground zero for two of Northern California's worst fires in recent years.

More than 100 houses burned during the Jones Fire in 1999; the Bear Fire razed dozens more in 2004. That's a lot in a town with just 300 or so homes. Memories of the fires remain sharp, and they've been brought to the fore by the Angora Fire in South Lake Tahoe. The Tahoe blaze has blackened 3,100 acres and destroyed 254 homes and 75 other structures since it began on June 24, the U.S. Forest Service said Sunday. Full containment is expected by today.

Jones Valley's road to recovery provides a map of the journey South Lake Tahoe will make in the months and years to come. It won't be easy, locals said, and not everyone will be up to it. A lot of people in Jones Valley threw in the towel after the Bear Fire and moved away.

But those who stayed to rebuild said they found strength they never knew they had, and the people of South Lake Tahoe will, too.

"You've got to have hope," said Larry Elliott, who owns the Hidden Valley Market with his wife, Muriel. "You've got to just go forward."

Jones Valley and the surrounding communities have largely recovered from the two fires, which burned 37,048 acres between them. Homes have been rebuilt and the forest rehabilitated. Most of the scars left by the fires have faded, but it has taken three years.

"You'd be impressed by how it looks," said Shasta County Supervisor Glenn Hawes, whose district includes Jones Valley and other towns devastated by the two fires. "It's beautiful. You can still see remnants of the fire, but the grass cover is thick and there are young trees and the wildflowers are just awesome in the spring. It's really nice."

Jones Valley sits at the end of a two-lane road that winds north from Highway 299 through a canyon to Shasta Lake. The Jones Fire started outside of town just before dawn Oct. 16, 1999, and burned 26 miles south to the Redding airport before firefighters contained it three days later. It blackened 26,202 acres and destroyed 954 structures. No one ever determined how it started.

The Jones Fire was the state's fourth-worst on record in terms of structures lost, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The town had no sooner gotten back on its feet when a man mowing his lawn on a blazing hot afternoon sparked the Bear Fire on Aug. 11, 2004. It burned 10,848 acres and destroyed 86 structures as it raced north and east through the forest for four days.

"That entire mountain went up like it was doused in gasoline," said Richard Saffen, who moved to Jones Valley in 1983. The ridge just behind his house was among the first to burn. He did what he could to protect his home with a garden hose until the water pressure gave out. Then he fled.

"My house was ash," he said. "It was devastating. It hurt me more than anything's ever hurt me in my life. I was sick for weeks. I went through fits of depression like I'd never felt before."

Saffen started rebuilding almost immediately and moved into a new house "six months to the day" after the fire. Others weren't so fortunate. It took months to clean up, and months more before many people could start rebuilding. Some of them are still at it.

Many folks said the insurance companies and the Federal Emergency Management Agency treated them well enough. But it isn't easy to rebuild your life, they said. The house can be rebuilt and the furniture replaced, but so much more is lost forever.

"One of the things that hurt the most was losing all of my mother's jewelry. It's all gone. My first train set from when I was 10. My first pistol from when I was 16 ... , " Saffen said, his voice trailing off. "Every day, every single day, I think of something else I lost in that fire. It's just so devastating. The only thing that helps is time."

Time has eased the pain brought by the two fires, which many said brought a close-knit town even closer. Those who didn't lose their homes helped those who did -- providing a bite to eat, a place to say, a shoulder to cry on. If people needed anything, they only had to ask.

"It really changed people," said Muriel Elliott. "They got close and they stayed close. It's a common bond. Everybody knows it could happen again at any time, and if it wasn't you last time, it could be you next time."

She and her husband have owned the Hidden Valley Market for eight years. Both fires came within a few dozen yards of the place, but it was spared. Their home was, too.

That's not to say emotions weren't raw. Some residents were upbeat, knowing they'd survived. But some were angry "at no one in particular and everyone in general," Muriel Elliott said. She herself went through survivor's guilt, wondering why her home had been spared when so many others had burned.

"You try to be encouraging, but you feel like a hypocrite," she said.

Much of the land burned in the Bear Fire had already been blackened by the Jones Fire. The fire burned through trees 60 and 70 years old, so it will be decades before the forest is that grand again.

But the trees that survived are tall and healthy, and the hillsides -- though brown now for the summer -- are covered in grass, manzanita and more than 4,000 ponderosa pine seedlings.

"We've been planting trees out here since the fire," said Lisa Smith, a fuels management specialist with the National Forest Service. "It should look really good in 10 years."

The Bear Fire, like the Jones Fire before it, had barely been contained before the U.S. Forest Service and National Resource Conservation Service began rehabilitating the forest. They've cleared dead trees and brush from 600 acres around Jones Valley in an aggressive effort to minimize the risk of another catastrophic fire.

Most of the homes have a healthy amount of defensible space around them to lower the fire risk, but some yards remain little more than thickets of grass and brush. Local officials have promised a free weekend on a patio boat to the person who clears the most brush and debris from around his home. It is a sign of how seriously people take fire prevention.

"People get really upset if they see you mowing in the afternoon," said the Rev. Ken Landers, pastor of Crossroads Baptist Church in nearby Bella Vista, referring to the possibility of a mower sparking a blaze when a blade hits a rock. "They start honking and yelling and they'll let you know they don't approve."

The church burned to the ground during the Jones Fire, when embers blew ahead of the fire and landed on the roof. Landers arrived just in time to see the roof collapse. He'd been inside just hours before, making coffee.

"A drinking fountain and a tiled wall around it was all that was left standing," he said. "We've still got the drinking fountain. It's in the storage building."

The insurance company paid $350,000. Another $80,000 poured in from churches around the country. It was enough to rebuild the church, which the parishioners -- all 85 of them -- did with their own hands. It's a fine building, twice as big as the one it replaced. Landers delivered the first sermon from its pulpit six months after the fire. It was Easter Sunday.

"That was our goal -- to have it done for Easter," he said. "It was a rebirth."

A parishioner sifting through the ashes after the fire found the page of a hymnal, scorched and charred at the edges but otherwise fine. The title of the hymn is "Only Trust Him." Landers framed it and hung it in the foyer of the church.

He's been following the news about the fire in South Lake Tahoe, and his heart aches, because he's been there.

"It's hard to watch, because I know what they're feeling," he said. "You don't know if your home is there, if it's not there. That's the worst, the not knowing. My heart goes out to them.

"It will be a long road back, and some won't make it. But those who do will be stronger for it."