This Utah town is watching its mountain and way of life burn

SALT LAKE CITY — Brent and Susan Oldroyd were camping in southwestern Utah when a friend called and urged them to evacuate. The Cottonwood Fire, currently the largest wildfire in the country, had just begun.

Since last Sunday, it has spread across nearly 94,000 acres, and as of Monday evening, it was only 4% contained.

In Mike’s Food Town in Beaver on Monday afternoon, Susan Oldroyd described the chaos that had enveloped her town over the past week. Like many of her neighbors, she and her grandchildren spend their weekends camping in Fishlake National Forest. But at about 3:30 p.m. on June 21, she “looked up and saw the smoke coming right toward us.”

So we started throwing things in the trailer and picking up camp,” she said. The Oldroyds, their children and their nine grandchildren had to take alternate routes out of the canyon to avoid the fire.

Meanwhile, Beaver Mayor Matt Robinson was leaving work when the first faint plumes of smoke rose out of Beaver Canyon. “I looked at my son Cole, and I said, ‘Oh, no.’ Within minutes, it was a raging fire,” he told the Deseret News.

The mountains to the east of Beaver are a place of refuge for many in the 3,700-person town. “To see it burn this dramatically — to watch it unfold right there on the mountain range, just on full display for everybody to see, was difficult. It has been difficult,” Robinson said.

For the wildfire’s first few days, Robinson watched the mountains glow red at night.

‘It’s going to look different’

At Beaver’s community meeting on Monday evening, about a third of the town’s high school auditorium was filled with tired, attentive residents.

Over its roughly 145-mile area, the Cottonwood Fire has destroyed 150 structures. About 130 in the affected area are still standing with no damage.

Jared Whitmer, a Forest Service district ranger, told residents from the stage that the firefighters are making good progress, but the area “is going to look different” when they’re allowed back in.

When Whitmer said that Big Tree, a massive, 350-year-old Ponderosa Pine in the Tushar Mountains, was destroyed in the wildfire, an audible groan reverberated around the auditorium.

Due to dried-out vegetation, high temperatures and extreme wind speeds, flames were able to reach 100 feet in height during the fire’s peak. These extreme conditions carried the flames over 43,251 acres last Tuesday.

Beyond cabins, condos and RVs, the fire destroyed the area’s established electrical grid. Tom Heaton, the regional business manager for PacifiCorp, told residents that the company currently has no estimated time of restoration. “Transformers melted to the ground, there was damage to the substation — all of our facilities up on the mountain are gone,” he said. “They’re just gone.”

“It’s going to take a lot of time and money to restore service to the customers up the canyon,” Heaton said.

He said the Cottonwood Fire will cost PacifiCorp millions in lost facilities in the canyon.

Stuck in the mountains with no car

Sundance residents Lynn and Pamela Jenkins run a business renting out condos at Eagle Point Resort on Airbnb. Last Monday, June 22, Lynn Jenkins took their car into town right before the Cottonwood Fire started.

When Lynn Jenkins learned about the fire, he called his wife, but law enforcement wouldn’t let him back up the canyon to go get her. “So I went around the other side to go up the back way,” he told the Deseret News. “I was getting ready to run the roadblocks when I got a phone call from somebody up there who said they’d bring her off the mountain.”

“It was frightening how fast — I took the first picture, then 10 minutes later the smoke was three times bigger,” Pamela Jenkins explained. “It was nerve-wracking, because I didn’t know what to do.”

It was 8 p.m. on the evening of Monday, June 22, by the time Pamela Jenkins made it off the mountain. By the next morning, seven of their eight condos had burned to the ground.

On Tuesday, June 30, the Beaver County Sheriff’s Office will escort them to their property to see the damage and claim anything that still remains.

The Cottonwood Fire is particularly devastating to the Jenkins family, since they were denied insurance on several of their condos. “I don’t think it’s right that the insurance companies can deny you, and then you lose everything,” he said.

When asked if he’d seen a fire like Cottonwood before, Lynn Jenkins said, “Nobody has. The fire grew faster than anything anyone’s ever seen.”

Park Service officials ask residents to pray for the firefighters

As the community event wrapped up on Monday evening, Gwen Sanchez, a deputy incident commander with the Forest Service, told residents to pray for the firefighters dispatched across the West.

She referenced the three firefighters who died while responding to the Knowles Fire in western Colorado on Saturday.

“The firefighting community is very close. Everybody knows everybody, because we work so close together — and that’s across the entire West,” Sanchez said. “These firefighters are away from their families. They’re away from their loved ones. They’re away from their kids. They’re away from their life, and they’re here supporting this community. We’re doing it because that’s what we love.”

She asked Beaver residents to keep those firefighters in their prayers and to show them love when they see them around town.

The fields connected to Beaver’s elementary school are filled with rows of tents housing transplant firefighters. They work in staggered shifts to keep workers fighting the fires on the mountain around the clock.