Facebook Post 9-4-20
Big Creek is Smoking Hot! Who else wants to get smoked in the BC? Come see Ada and I this weekend....
Facebook Post 9-4-22
This was the day that Ada and I will never forget.
Gene Van Dyne started coming up to the Shaver Lake area in the early 1940’s and moved to Lower Cressman Road in 1947 when he was 12 and his family purchased 160 acres covering the area roughly from 35822 Lower Cressman to the back gate at the end of Lower Cressman Road.
On Friday, September 4, 2020, my family and I left for our annual church backpacking trip near Florence Lake. There were probably 30 people in our group of all ages. The littlest kid we had was probably four or five years old. We all drove up to Florence Lake, took the little ferry across the lake and then hiked the four miles to the campsite.
Camp Sierra is less than a mile up canyon from where the Creek Fire started. At the time I was the President of the Camp Sierra Conference Association which runs a nonprofit group camp. At the time, the camp was surrounded by 71 private cabins in the Sierra National Forest.
A different perspective.
My Creek Fire experience is a little different than many that are told from a first-hand, on-the-scene account. I bore witness while those I loved were dealing with the trauma & the fear. I monitored as many scanner feeds & information as I could to give to others who also had loved ones up there.
Urgency, with compassion…
When the Creek Fire began, in early September of two thousand twenty, nobody grasped the scope of what was to come. Four months later and 380,000 acres burned by the end of December, all the stories of the heroics can never be told. Heroics may be the wrong phrase......humanity, may be more appropriate.
