I have a project for us." It was my mom calling from Shaver. My husband ,Tim, and I were getting ready to load our dogs into the car and head up to my parents’ house to spend Labor Day weekend like we do almost every year. This year it was different.
My name is Tori Lysdahl-Goss. I was raised in Shaver Lake and graduated from both Big Creek Elementary and Sierra High School. After many years away pursuing my career as a professional singer and actress, in 2013 I and my husband, David Goss, returned to Shaver, becoming full-time residents of Ockenden Ranch.
Goat racing, scratching the pigs with sticks through the fence, feeding the chickens, walking down the dirt road with my mom who said “If I could give you a pill that would keep you this age forever, would you take it?”
We had long yearned to have our own slice of heaven in the Sierras. A place where we could create a homestead, raise our two kids, and enjoy our lives under the canopies of the large sugar pines, firs, and
cedars.
My name is Jem Bluestein and I live down in beautiful downtown Academy right off Highway 168. Our music and arts community owns 100 acres out on Sugarloaf and 134 acres on Musick Creek below Dogwood Mountain subdivision.
Suffice it to say, 2020 was hard. I’d spent all spring and summer thinking that the kids and I would go back to school in August, and we would get some normalcy back in our lives. It didn’t happen. By Labor Day weekend of 2020 I was feeling pretty wrung out.
September 8th at 12:22am. My almost 5 year old is asleep in my bed because of a bad dream. My phone rings and I quickly grab it before it wakes her up. It’s my dad, responding to the text I had sent him only minutes before. “It’s gone, it’s all gone” is what he tells me when I pick up.
My name is Vince Wiggins, and my husband is Keith Davis. We bought 10 acres on Sharin Woods Rd in the spring of 2000. Sharin Woods means Sharing Woods. They left off the g from Sharing to make it sound more country or hillbilly like. As one neighbor told me years ago, “It means we’re sharin dah woods!”
My name is John Mount and I live in Meadow Lakes. On the day of the start of the fire my wife Dona said to me, “There's a fire in Big Creek,” and I said, “Oh, okay. How big?” And she says, “Oh, it's about a half an acre.” And I said, “Just absolutely no problem, don't worry about it, they’ll get that real quick."
