BY KAREN BOSSICK

Matt Guyre and Kelly Cavanaugh lost their livelihood in 10 minutes as 45-mile-per-hour winds pushed the Wapiti Fire through their property along Valley Creek Road nine miles west of Stanley Friday morning.

“We had literally just pulled out of the driveway when the fire began ripping through and in 10 minutes it had burned everything real quick, real, real fast. It was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen,” said Cavanaugh.

“Our cabin is still there, but we lost the dome and structures built for my husband’s logging equipment and all the logs he was selling. We lost a $100,000 of property value, and $20,000 in equipment loss, but we are more sad about the forest, animals and land,” she added. “The land was completely torched. The ground is incinerated—so hot that there’s no life left. There’s no way you can plant a tree there now.”

The fire, fueled by lots of dead and dying trees, was a monster.

Guyre and Cavanaugh, who have owned the 50 acre property behind forest road 304 for five years, watched on Monday, Aug. 19, as the Wapiti Fire pushed over the ridge separating the Grandjean area from the Stanley Basin and began running down Elk Creek into the Stanley Lake area. The fire was sparked by lightning near Grandjean on July 24.

Nervously, they and two other homeowners in their area watched as the fire continued to rampage fueled by above-average temperatures, dry conditions and winds gusting to more than 25 miles per hour.

Firefighters set up camp at the base of their driveway. But they did not have structure protection because they had no orders to do so.  There was just little to no information given.   Their property was off the map of the Zone 1 READY, SET, GO so information was limited.

We had a false sense of hope with the fire camp set-up at the edge of the property line.

This was a picture taken before the fire.

On Thursday Cavanaugh returned to the Wood River Valley to get her daughters ready for school. But when she heard that the fire had exploded that night, consuming 20,000 acres in a 24-hour period, she returned to Stanley Friday morning.

“We had zero warning that we needed to be ready to evacuate,” she said. “The firefighters pulled their fire camp—they didn’t even put water from their trucks on our cabin. We had an hour there and everything was gone.”

Their cabin came out unscathed only because of pure luck and the fact that Matt thinned out dead and downed trees and ground fuel over the last two summers.

“Our neighbor--from Jackson, Wyo.--had just completed their hand-hewn cabin. It was their retirement, everything to them. Their cabin is in a marshy area by the creek so that helps, but they’re not out of the woods yet. The wind swirled back around behind them where there’s a dry part. Fortunately, the new fire management team is on their property, spraying it and protecting it.”

This is what’s left of Matt Guyre’s property following the fire.

The Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team 1 took over Sunday as the fire became the nation’s top priority. Glen Lewis, fire behavior analyst for the team, said that efforts to fight the fire are limited because of the immense amount of dead and dying trees that have been allowed to build up in the forest.

“My husband is truly a steward of the forest who wants the forest to thrive and be healthy, and that’s why this is so devastating because he’d done everything right,” Cavanaugh said. He’s helped people with firewood, given people wood for fencing…

“My husband has always advocated for fuel reduction but the SNRA doesn’t do that so our land is completely torched, my husband’s livelihood lost, our future gone. Meanwhile, my husband is volunteering, deploying water on the helipad in the midst of losing his land, working in dirty yellow scrubs to help other people so they don’t go through what we went through.”

Cavanaugh is buoyed by the resolve of the new incident command team to fully suppress the fire threatening the community that she has called home for 20 years.

They’re trying to help the people in the Iron Creek, Homestead and Crooked Creek neighborhoods. These people have children, animals and they’re living in campers in these brutal smoky conditions. In the future, we need to deploy state firefighters around to provide better structure protection. And we need to have better information—the websites and Facebook where we’ve been getting information have not always been kept up to date. And we need actual forest fuel reduction.”

The SNRA has done little to reduce fuels in the Pettit Lake area, Cavanaugh added, and she’s worried it could be in trouble if there is a future fire, as a result.

If the SNRA doesn’t adopt a new forest management plan, our problems will not go away.

“Not only does it burn our land but it shows no concern for air pollution or climate change,” she said. “Do you realize that the fires we’ve had in the SNRA in the past two years are responsible for more preventable carbon emissions than all the cars in Idaho?”