Behind us, the land was only slightly hilly; small, forested swells eventually culminated in a gentle rise of land on which old logging scars were visible. The red dot on the BC Wildfire Services site showed that the lone northern fire should have been well in front of the old clear-cuts, but we could see no indication of it. However, as we stood there, the heli-noise increased and a Bell 407 detached itself from the main fire area and flew within binocular range. It bore the insignia of White Saddle Air, a thriving helicopter business south of Tatla Lake, and was likely piloted by Mike King. The chopper was slinging a large red bucket on a long cable. The lip of the bucket trailed a comet-tail spray of water that glittered in the smoke-veiled sunlight. The pilot headed directly toward where I had estimated the north fire to be, hovered low, and despite the thick haze, we could see an upward spray of smoke, ash and steam. So a fire was there. The pilot had brought his first load of water from a lake south of the highway, but now he hunted around the nearby country for swampy pockets that contained puddles big enough for his purpose, and to my surprise he found a few. Despite the rapid browning and crisping of the country, rivers and ponds were still relatively high.
The motion a helicopter makes when it picks up water reminds me of nothing other than a broody hen settling on her eggs. The pilot dumped several loads on the site; steam and ash flew every time, but eventually he headed back to the main fire. Although he disappeared into the distance and smoke, we could hear that he was repeating the exercise at various other locations. White Saddle was operating two choppers that day, but alone they would make very little impact. We would not be able to expect much assistance from farther afield for a while. The firefighting machine generally takes at least a week to get going, and any firefighters that might be mobilized this year would be deployed around the much bigger centres. The choppers droned steadily throughout the day; later we heard one coming back overhead. No sound of the bobbing and lifting associated with the bucketing, just circling, then returning from where it had come. That tiny fire was out. We never saw any activity there again. I was to thank our firefighters time and time again for that propitious intervention.
One more fire was of concern to me. It was between my place and the coast. Lightning had struck a bluff beside the Atnarko River, near Stillwater Lake. I had built my first cabin beside that river, a half-day’s walk south of the lake (there are no roads in there). It had been destroyed in the 2004 Lonesome Lake Fire. By then I had long since ceased to live there and the cabin’s destiny had been to return to nature; it just happened sooner than expected. The area around the Stillwater, at that time, had remained unburned. I zoomed in on the USDA map and could see that the strike was right above where the Hotnarko River spills into the Atnarko.
The Hotnarko is spawned in the Chilcotin and runs into a steep, wild canyon before reaching the valley bottom. Steep hillsides act as chimneys; eagles, condors and hang-gliders make use of these updrafts; they welcome nature’s helping hand. But fires love them also; they are the most likely climate conditions to send a blaze out of control.
The direction of the Hotnarko valley is northeast to southwest. In this country, southwest winds are the wildest and most violent. (It was a southwest wind that was blasting through Lee’s Corner as we drove by.)
Friends of mine lived above the Hotnarko Canyon in a place where the valley widened enough to support a ranch and a market garden. The distance between them and the strike was only ten kilometres. In 2004, the southwest wind had driven the Lonesome Lake Fire along the upper Atnarko River twenty kilometres in two days. My friends’ properties could be in very great danger.
The Precipice / Stillwater / Hotnarko Fire
Fred
Precipice, July 7–8
Monika and I live at the very western edge of the Chilcotin, where the Hotnarko River drops steeply through the Coast Mountains toward Bella Coola and the Burke Channel. Our valley is called the Precipice because of the organ-pipe basalt columns—evidence of the Chilcotin’s volcanic origins—that rim its northern edge. The valley is a bit of an oddity in this country, which is otherwise wild and mountainous. Six kilometres long and an average of half a kilometre wide, it is hung at an elevation of 800 metres. This puts it roughly halfway between the harsher Chilcotin and the lush coast in altitude, and it has a climate somewhere in between. Right below our property is the boundary of the Tweedsmuir Provincial Park.
Our home is off-grid, and isolated from the interior of British Columbia by thirty-five kilometres of bush. A rough tote road and a logging road get us to the small community of Anahim Lake. From there it is another three hundred kilometres of lonely highway to the city of Williams Lake. We like our isolation and use the internet only sporadically so it is understandable that we would not be immediately aware of the number of fires that broke out on July 7.
When Monika noticed the plume of smoke to the west of us, I was not much interested and did not encourage her to report the fire, saying that it was probably already called in. Monika was more concerned than I. She had to make a few phone calls before connecting with the wildfire office in Bella Coola. They had not in fact been informed of the fire and wanted to know the colour of the smoke and how big it was. We estimated it to be two to four hectares but really had no idea of the actual size (in fact it was likely much smaller). The smoke was pale grey. Thus our fire became VA0778, the Precipice/Stillwater Lake/Hotnarko Fire. It probably would never have received the name “Precipice” if Monika had not explained where she was calling from.
I am not sure why this fire did not concern me from the outset. I should not have been so cavalier or naive about it. I had experienced fires before, the first going back to my childhood in Saskatchewan. My dad and uncles had lit a stubble fire in the spring after a heavy fall harvest. There was too much dry straw to work into the soil so they decided to burn it before cultivation. The fire was lit on a calm spring morning, on a small rise over a kilometre from my uncle’s house. Siblings and cousins were assembled to help. We each had burlap grain sacks to fan or beat the flames as needed—an exciting outing for a child of ten years.
The fire occasionally flared in the deeper straw and then crawled lazily between swaths until it reached more dry material and again sprang into life. For an hour or so it spread slowly within the perimeter of our wet sacks. But winds like fire and fires love wind. The field sloped from the crest of land where we had started down toward my uncle’s homestead, which was nestled behind a ring of aspen and spruce trees. The stubble was much thicker on the lower slopes, where more retained moisture resulted in greater yields. At the same time as the flames found more fuel in the denser straw, the winds picked up and began driving the fire toward the homestead.
Gentle laughter and conversation was replaced by shouts and screams of alarm. We could not attack the front of the fire as the smoke quickly robbed our breath, yet I remember rushing in to do what I could whenever I spotted a weak spot at the front of the fire. Voices came and went depending on the whim of the blaze as it captured our words in mid-air and sent them skyward with the smoke.
The adults, in a desperate panic, tried to create a fire-break between the raging stubble fire and the ring of trees. My uncle drove our tractor, pulling a disc plow between the flames and the homestead in order to try to mix some of the straw into the ground and thus reduce available fuel. However, the ground was much too wet. The tractor got bogged down halfway across the swale at the bottom of the long slope. Not only was the homestead in danger, but now we had a tractor stuck even closer to the advancing flames.