Catching up...Forest Fire from June

Utah suffered severe drought this summer.  We were horrified to hear, in June, that the canyon our family cabin is in was on fire...It's a small canyon, and to hear and see news reports from little known "Argyle Canyon" was surreal.  My parents hadn't been able to insure the cabin, as there isn't fire hydrant access.  It was my grandparent's property, and my dad, brothers, and family have spent countless hours building the cabin.  

For 3 weeks we called in daily for updates, and were often told the fire was exactly on our land.  At one point they pulled the firefighters out as the flames were 200 feet high and it was unsafe.  They brought in a DC 10 from Idaho--the first time they'd used that big of a plane in a Utah fire, and at its peak there were over 550 firefighters battling the blaze.

We were amazed and ever-so-grateful when we finally received word that our damage was minimal, and the incredible fireman had saved the cabin.  9 of our 10 acres are burned, but they saved the cabin!

We had a motion sensor camera hooked up to record animals, and the fire set it off, I thought the pictures were really cool.

Hard to tell, but you can see the pines through the mist.  This was an air drop of fire retardant on the cabin.  

This picture scares me!  The camera is on the cabin, and that wall of fire is burning waaaaay to close!

Our heroes!  The stealth cam took lots of pictures of all different trucks coming and going. 

The fire coming back at night

These are pictures of our neighbors, who weren't so lucky.  He's sitting on his 4 wheeler...

My brother Kao next to our generator shed, which burned.  We have a lot of clean up to do-- there are countless 80-100' tall pines that are tall sticks of charcoal.  We need to cut them down and burn them...it will be so much work!

The first time I went back up I cried-- this outlook is usually so gorgeous, full of pines and aspens...now burned.

This was taken about 6 weeks after the fire-- new life was growing!

This is the cabin just to the west of us, totally burned.  So sad.