Hazel
October 8, 2025
Story collected by Lara Conkey-Wiebelhaus and Karyl Clark
Written by Written by Lara Conkey-Wiebelhaus
All photos courtesy Hazel Mae Halbert
We arrive at the Cohasset Community Association building for our interview with Hazel Mae Halbert. The CCA is busy. A hub for gathering information and getting supplies two months post-Park Fire. Hazel's children Cruz, nine, and Julz, seven, run off to join in play with children on the playground. We meander through the hustle and bustle and find a picnic table.
“Absolutely the main thing about my house is that it was so unique. I want it to live on forever, you know, by showing pictures of it, telling stories. It's a ghost house now. Every day I still feel like it’s there but then I remember it’s gone. The fading images in my mind are really making me sad lately,” Hazel tells us. For the past twelve years, she and her family lived in Cohasset on the corner of lower Vilas and Ponderosa in a Victorian-style house.
The stately home sat nestled amidst trees and shrubs, hidden from view. Hazel grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and says that’s why she chose to move to this mountain community. She and her husband, John had a huge garden with lush concord grape vines over growing the fence and an abundance of herbs that she harvested for tinctures and teas.
“My property is still there but my beautiful home is not,” she says. The unique home was built in the 1980’s and Hazel, as the new owner, had been putting a lot of hard work and love into finishing it traditionally, down to the ornate doorknobs and hinges, and hand painted tiles.
“I used to teach mosaics, stained glass, and ceramics so I knew that some ceramics would withstand the heat.” She has found some of the tiles and other things in the ashes and plans to use them in a memorial mosaic.
Hazel and her family evacuated the evening of the Park Fire, Wednesday July 24, 2024. “Thursday morning, we all woke up thinking everything might be ok because they had a line on the fire and I thought, oh my god, we're gonna be able to go home.” Within a few hours that thinking changed.
The winds shifted Thursday. Hazel could feel her life shattering. She believes that is when her home burnt. Her neighbors had a beautiful custom built log home that was very fire safe with plenty of defensible space. Friday morning, a friend messaged her, it’s not looking good. (Your neighbor’s) place is gone. Hazel knew what Jill was trying to tell her - if their place was gone then her place likely was too.
That morning a good friend offered to ride his mountain bike up to their property. Hazel and John were worried about him riding up with the fire still burning but their friend insisted on checking anyways. It took him hours to get there. He sadly confirmed that their home had burned and sent them pictures. They still didn't want to believe it was gone.
“It's pretty sad when your own home looks unrecognizable to you,” she tells us.
A few days later Hazel, John, and the kids drove up the hill themselves and still couldn't believe their home was gone.
“None of us wanted to come up here and see that, but I feel like we needed to know. So, yeah, we got up there and it was one of our worst days ever. The kids have been very resilient through the whole thing. My daughter has been a little positive angel through all of it, which I really needed,” Hazel shares. “My son, he's having a little harder time. I think because he is older, he just processes things a little differently. Still, when we come up here, he asks not to, not that he doesn't love it up here, but it just hurts seeing it different now. Driving up seeing all the burnt areas.”
The Park Fire incident started July 24, 2024, in Upper Bidwell Park around two-thirty in the afternoon.
“Thankfully we were home, and I got the first warning that there was a fire in Upper Park. I was like oh no. But thought, they'll have it out quick and just kinda went about our day.”
Thirty minutes later it went to a Level 3 evacuation order. GO! Julz looked outside and told her mother it was getting cloudy. Hazel could see smoke. When they went outside, they could hear sirens. Emergency crews were driving up and down roads and driveways telling everyone to evacuate.
“I had people messaging me to go now, leave, take videos, take pictures. So sadly, our last moments in our home were pretty chaotic. I started filming, the kids were crying as I was running frantically around.”
John wasn't home and called to tell her to wait for him to get there and they would grab some things. He called back ten minutes later and said they wouldn't let him up. The road was closed. You've got to go now, he told her.
“After John called I kind of went blank and didn't grab anything else. We just hopped in the little van and went,” Hazel remembers. “Unfortunately, we couldn't find our cat, Star, in the house. She was there one second and gone the next because she could probably feel something wasn't right.”
A few days before the fire, on the way home from a vacation in Fort Bragg, Hazel's transmission blew up and her vehicle was in the shop when the fire started. She thought was going to have to evacuate with her children in their Polaris Razor. Luckily John had left the keys inside the van Hazel had inherited after her father’s death just two months before the fire. “It was amazing that the keys were in it! We grabbed barely anything, and I tossed a big rock saw I had gotten a week or two prior out,” Hazel tells us. “We grabbed our bags that we had still packed from Fort Bragg and off we went. I grabbed my dog, Taz, but didn't have his kennel. I always said I would stick my dog and the cat in the kennel right away in an emergency, but it was in my vehicle that was in the shop.”
Hazel and the kids headed down the hill just past 7:00 p.m. but didn't see that many people on the road. Right past the Welcome to Cohasset sign, Hazel pulled off the road thinking of all the things she forgot and desperately wanted to go back home to look for Star one last time. But she trusted her instincts and continued down the hill.
Hazel evacuated to a family home in Magalia where they had been evacuated from six years ago, during the Camp Fire. “It's kinda crazy that it all came full circle, and we were evacuating with them all these years later,” she says. They watched the Cohasset Ridge glowing over the next few days, their home burning. As the Park Fire continued to rage, they received evacuation warnings twice while in Magalia.
“Thankfully we have insurance. So far that process has been ok but will be ongoing for a while. Hopefully everything works out with that. We are probably going to rebuild something on the property. With today’s material costs and building codes we could never rebuild anything like what we had, but maybe a smaller version would be cool.” Their home was four stories with a half basement and full attic.
She explains how much red tape fire victims must navigate through. The Red Cross, Northern Valley Catholic Social Services, Tzu Chi, Tiny Pine Foundation, and GEM are a few of the foundations that were helpful after the fire. “It's kind of sad that so many foundations have started from these disasters and fires. Another thing that is kind of weird about all this is now that I'm a fire victim, everywhere I go and everyone I come across, lately, is a fire survivor or a fire victim. To be one of the statistics now is just crazy.”
The family has relocated to Durham. They are renting with the opportunity to buy. They are hoping there is enough money from insurance to buy in Durham and eventually rebuild something in Cohasset on their property. “I would hate to just leave my property up here to just sit. That's sad. To think of never living up here or being able to come up and stay a few days or, maybe, in a few years come back up here to live full time … not being able to do that sounds so horrible to me. It's already so sad how much the fire has affected our community. People move all over the place, it spreads everybody out. It just changes everything.
“I am so grateful that our Community Association and some people are still up here, but for those of us that don't have homes up here anymore it’s gonna be hard to still be an active member of this community, unfortunately.
“Remember what we have up here, even though some things are gone. You know we still have each other and people we've met up here, even if not all of us are back. It's a beautiful place and a beautiful community. Fires are good for the land so I think it will take a while, but the landscape will come back. Maybe not the huge old trees, sadly, but I already see our community pulling together.
“There is always a fear of fire in these mountain communities. Don’t fear it! Enjoy what you have while you have it.”
Hazel grieves her parents’ cremains, feeling that she let them burn again.
Daily she grieves the loss of her cat. Star was a beautiful, blue-eyed Cohasset cat given to her daughter, Julz, for her birthday. Although given to Julz, Star loved John. Every night she would cuddle with him. She also loved Hazel and Taz, Hazel's 16-year-old mini-Doberman. Hazel recalls how Star would help Taz, almost blind and deaf, navigate the yard and always wanted to be near him. She also went on many adventures on the property with the family.
“That's definitely been the hardest thing for me because I feel like I left her,” Hazel admits. “But when you're in that situation your mind goes into protect mode and my mind was telling me, everything will be fine, it will be fine. There were so many things I picked up and put back down telling myself, I don't need that, it'll be fine.”
Hazel's intuition had her mind filled with the weirdest thoughts and feelings just days before the fire. Looking around and thinking, how would all this look if a fire came through. On the better side of things, with these thoughts and feelings she found herself savoring the moments in her home and on her property. Videoing her kids playing, something telling her to capture these moments, soak it all in.
“You really don't know what you have until it’s gone, unfortunately,” Hazel says with sadness in her voice. “That house was a lot of work, a lot of maintenance. I cussed it all the time, but now that it’s gone, I wish I'd never ever gotten frustrated with it or thought anything bad about it.” She loved to decorate her home with antiques and all her favorite collected things, glass bottles, bee and peacock-themed decor, rocks, and crystals. A friend once referred to the house as, Hazel’s witchy home of dreams.
“There are so many beautiful homes spread out and hidden all throughout these ridges and mountains. I think they need to be remembered. Especially when they are gone.”
Hazel paid off her home before she turned forty last March, which was a bucket list item for her. Having no mortgage was how they were able to afford fire insurance. She was paying a $1,200 monthly premium.
On their property, there was a small pocket that didn't burn. Their Polaris RZR and John’s late father’s Bronco were amazingly spared. “We tried to clear things away from the house. It pains me to think about where the fire may have caught on my home, which I will never know, but that's all I was thinking of. Did it go through the vents in the basement? Did it catch in the gutters, on the roof?”
Hazel's mother passed away nine years before the fire and the truck Hazel inherited from her burned. Her mom always drew hearts. The two collected heart rocks together or found heart shapes in nature. There was a slow flow of aluminum from the rim of the truck tire and at the end of it was a heart shape. “I felt that was my mom saying, everything will be fine.”
“I think that's going to be my next tattoo - it is what it is.”
