STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Vance Hanawalt could see the plume of smoke rising above the hills near Rock Creek Canyon at 2 p.m. Labor Day—about 15 minutes after the fire was believed to have been sparked by lightning.

He called 911 like he always does when he sees smoke. Told it was in the Glendale Road area five miles southwest of Bellevue, he looked it up on his computer.

“I thought, ‘They’re going to get it out. It’s not very big, maybe 20 acres,’ ” he said.

There is a black landscape out Rock Creek but the homes survived.

But they didn’t get it out. What would eventually be called the Glendale Fire continued to grow and so Hanawalt and his neighbor drove out Rock Creek Road to Hattie’s Gulch.

“We saw it increasing in volume but it was way south. We went back to the house and by 5 o’clock it seemed to be getting bigger and bigger so we drove to a high point, but it still seemed it was not going to get to us,” he recounted.

Within the hour, however, the wind shifted and the fire started moving closer. A fire engine roared into the Rancho Cielo neighborhood. Then a sheriff’s deputy showed up, yelling that Hanawalt and his wife Valerie Thor needed to leave immediately.

“We saw it come over the ridge. It was really scary. We had 15 minutes to get what we wanted out of the house.”

Dennis Higman captured this picture of the fire, which offered an orange spectacle for those out and about Monday night.

Hanawalt and Thor gathered their Russian Blue cat named Blue, their computers and their passports, and Hanawalt helped his wife into the car and watched her drive away. His travel trailer was already packed and hooked up since they had planned to go camping at Alturas Lake. So, he drove it out of the neighborhood and down the main road and parked in a place he felt he could get out quickly if worse came to worse.

Then he turned around to watch the fire, realizing he might be seeing the home he’d lived in for 30 years go up in flames.

“I thought our houses were going to get burned down for sure—the flames appeared to be 25, 35 feet high coming at us. It was apocalyptic,” he said.

All of a sudden, a DC-10 jet came in at tree level, dropped a load of retardant on flames near the top of a ridge, putting them out. It was followed by another jet, which dumped retardant on the side of the hill as a buffer zone between the fire and the houses.

A helicopter continued to dump water on Tuesday.

A helicopter dropped 2,000 gallons of water onto flames, then returned to the Rock Creek Pond near the six homes in the neighborhood to pick up more water.

“About the time we thought we were going to get burned out, the bombers got the fire under control. Then all the fire trucks showed up, with one being stationed at each house. It was an incredible show of Wood River firefighting. And, for some reason, when eh fire got closer, the wind shifted and it calmed down. And when it was all over, we had no structure damage to anybody--just a lot of burnt sagebrush. It was miraculous.”

There’s been a half-dozen fires in Croy Canyon in the 30 years Hanawalt has lived there. Some have come close but not this close.

“The most southerly house was the most threatened. Our neighbor thought his house was going to burn, but miraculously it didn’t—his driveway stopped it.”

The fire was originally estimated to have charred 10,680 acres, but the number was reduced to more than 7,000 acres Tuesday afternoon after aircraft mapped it.

Idaho Power turned the power off in the neighborhood to prevent electrical wires from sparking a fire, and fire engines stayed on the Hanawalt’s property until about 11 p.m.

Police officers let Hanawalt’s wife back in at 8:30 p.m. so the two camped out in the trailer. And about 10:30 p.m. they heard the blessed sound of rain pattering on the roof.

About a quarter inch fell, Hanawalt said, and they woke up the next morning to an amazingly fresh smell, despite miles and miles of blackened dirt and burnt sagebrush in the distance.

“That rain—it really, really helped,” he said.

Hanawalt is also very thankful for the firefighters in the valley.

“They were all over it. They took care of business.”