Community Stories

The Resiliency Fund is committed to honoring the historical legacy of the Central Sierra region by collecting community stories of the Creek Fire–and the unique histories that precede it– and preserving those stories through the Central Sierra Historical Society.

We are collecting stories of places before and after the Creek Fire, and/or of your experience during the Fire itself.

Jem Bluestein

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.

Elizabeth Taylor

I wish I had known to say goodbye
To whisper words just one last time
To thank the place that was my home
To say goodbye, I wish I’d known.

Kristin Telles

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.

Samantha Legorreta

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.

Vince Wiggins

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!”

John Mount

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.”

Karen Dondero

It’s been a year now, I still get emotional when we talk about it. I was born and raised in Big Creek, my dad worked for Edison, my Mom for US Forest Service.

Robin Calderwood

On Friday when the fire happened, we all sat around the driveway looking at the big plume of smoke.

Deborah Bell

Domino. Three months to the day since Allyn last saw her. Our house and property burned the next night.

Marissa Neely

Marissa and Chris Neely are Shaver Lake locals who now live on their sailboat, named Avocet. This story was originally publised on their blog, Sailing Avocet: https://www.svavocet.com

Christina Pasillas

I was living in Alder Springs with my two small children which is located in Auberry, California at the time of the Creek Fire. I had been in the home since 2019. When I first saw this small little home with a beautiful view I knew it was the one and I had to buy it.

Steve Michael McQuillan

I was in South Lake Tahoe on the evening of September 4 on a four day family vacation that my daughter had arranged for all of us a year earlier. At approximately 7pm I received a page notifying me of a wildland fire near Camp Sierra and that our department had been dispatched.