January 6, 2025
Story collected by E. Vegvary and Karyl Clark
Written by E. Vegvary

Cohasset has just entered its sixth month of post-Park Fire recovery. Half a year gone. The shock has been worn out of the survivors, replaced with resignation. The grief is still there but often must be put on hold by the seemingly endless things that are required. The County has finished the first phase of their inspections of properties. The majority of property owners are now moving into Phase II of the cleanup process. Residents are expected to sign Right of Entry (ROE) agreements for contracted companies to come onto their properties to scrape them clean of all debris. Unbeknownst to many, however, Phase II also includes what appears to be clear cutting the burn scar.

The haunting beauty that could be found in the devastation last autumn is gone. Trees are being tagged and felled, there is a constant infiltration of white trucks and arborists. Teams can be found everywhere in the burn scar, on properties, spray painting trees, ribboning them, and placing barcodes at the base of each deemed hazardous.

Interestingly, this is ushering in a subtle shift on the hill. While personal losses are being reckoned with, a larger, overwhelming sense of loss regarding the aesthetics of the mountain community is becoming a daily emotion. Cohasset is unrecognizable to its residents.

There is a growing realization that wildfire is big business.

We meet with “Hippie” Josh Mossi, forty-five and Dana Silver, forty-two, on their five-acre Mud Creek Road property they purchased in 2017. Their home was destroyed, but Dana’s purple art studio was spared and saved and can be seen from the road, a small wonder for those driving through the near total loss of forest and homes.

When we arrive, Josh is walking his property line with the arborists who are identifying trees for removal. He knows where his corners are and shows them a monument, but they won’t take his word for it informing him they are going to consult with their own people and get back to him. We find ourselves witnessing a conversation between Josh and Dana and three of the County-contracted workers regarding the trees and the scraping of the house foundation. There is confusion about what exactly Josh agreed to when he signed the ROE at the Office of Emergency Services. He’s now being told that he agreed to both the debris removal and all his trees being cut. There is no either / or, it must be both. Like so many others on the hill, he wants some of his trees to mill into lumber. He’s told this isn’t possible. It’s the trees that are going to fund the expense of the cleanup. Yet again and again at public meetings residents were told that their burnt trees are worthless. He’s told he can keep the oak for firewood. Where he’s expected to burn his oak for warmth is an utterly offensive mystery.

He's informed that all the trees are a liability. The math is hard to follow, but trees hundreds of feet from the road are deemed potential hazards to the road. Bark beetles are also a concern. When he asks about a small grove of conifers with green in their needles, he’s assured the trees are dead.

The supervisor tells him that she will pull the crew for the day, to give him time to conduct his own research. But the underlying message is that they aren’t going to engage with him. Elsewhere, residents are beginning to funnel their outrage and rise together to address concerns and demand answers to questions about both their properties and their trees.

Dana makes an ironic joke about her view of the valley now. “I've been saying since we moved up here, in the wintertime, you know, if we just cut a few trees … it becomes a million-dollar property.” We laugh and all turn to take in the expansive view courtesy the Park Fire decimating the forest.

“Hippie” Josh and Dana want to share their story of evacuating the evening of the Park Fire, following Justin Autrey out to safety, driving in the road dust and the dark through the Sierra Pacific Industries timberlands.

This couple are calm and controlled. We’ve just seen this in their exchange with the tree crew. It’s these traits that enabled them to reassure panicked people during frightening chaos. On July 24, 2024, this couple and a handful of their friends helped to safely evacuate one hundred of their neighbors.

They are humble about their accomplishment. Quiet. Their desire, first and foremost, is to credit Justin Autrey for his level-headed bravery and assured self-confidence that night. They experienced first-hand his unwavering ability to step into the role of helper. “Hippie” wants nothing more than to champion his friend.

We settle in for the story, but as with all the fire survivors, the emotions of both Josh and Dana run very close to the surface.

The undeniability of their loss surrounds us. They count themselves blessed for being able to get their dog and outdoor cat into one of their trucks the night of the fire.

Dana has been sifting ash for treasures. She had so many. A collector at heart. Antique furniture, fossils, her grandmother’s native pottery.

Josh lost all the tools of his yard and pool trade and his Jeep. He’s comforted by the fact that he can no longer remember most of his belongings consumed by the fire. “This is the kind of sad but bittersweet thing,” he offers, “the more time goes by, the more you forget about what you had. It doesn't hurt as bad. It's kind of a weird thing. I can't remember all the stuff I actually had, you know?”

Dana keeps looking. She’s been made bereft by the loss of her father’s tools. “I think when I got up here and the alarm started going off … yeah. Our garage was open and Rich, our friend, said you need to grab anything else? I was like, let's just get out of here. And we were standing right next to my dad's tool bag.” She covers her eyes and begins to weep. “We left early. You know, we left stuff behind to leave early. We still got turned around at the sign.”

They won’t be returning to Cohasset. Dana says she is trying to embrace the philosophy that she owned these things, enjoyed them, and now they are gone. This includes her home and the wondrous experience of living on the hill. She particularly loved snowy days.

She’s thought about her losses and the grief that comes with loss. “I'm not a fan of doing things twice in my life. And I think this was a dream that we had, and we made it to fruition, and we lived it. And so, part of me says, let's find a dream. Let's make something else happen.”

She is very clearly standing on a threshold, waiting to step across.

“Hippie” Josh starts their evacuation story at a beginning that pre-dates the fire. By years. “This is important. This story. We went to a lot of fire meetings. Me and Justin and Jamey. We stressed every time we need a key to the gates. And they kept saying, oh, we got one. It's in the firehouse. No problem.” He’s referencing the Emergency Preparedness Committee meetings, the local bucket brigade gatherings, the occasional Town Hall hosted by the Cohasset Community Association with guest speakers from Cal Fire focusing on one-way-in-one-way-out evacuation. “They never had one. Nobody had it. And we were ready to cut the gates, you know? Luckily the mechanic for Sierra Pacific came towards us from their logging camp and started opening all the gates. So, by the time we got to the helicopter pad where we met with him, he said, if you know the way the gates are all open.”

Neither Josh nor Dana were on the hill when the Park Fire broke out in Upper Bidwell Park the afternoon of July 24, 2024. Both were at work in Chico.

Josh says, “I was having lunch. It was like, about 2:45, maybe 3. And my father-in-law was playing golf at the Bidwell Golf course. And he calls me, and he goes, hey, I'm seeing smoke. Looks like there's a fire at Alligator Hole. Because he's playing golf right there. And he's like, you might want to get home. So, I text Dana and tell her, hey, there's a fire in the park. I'm going to head home. I headed up here and I probably got here about 4:00, maybe 4:30. And then Dana got here –"

“-- right at 5:00, because we were watching the fire at work.” Dana remembers. “I work at the Enloe Cancer Center, and we were watching it. About 5:00 is when the fire turned and they were just like, it's going right for Cohasset. I left and came up here. So, I got here about 5:20, okay? With the way I drove.”

Josh, “We began getting the alerts on the phone. Just be ready, not evacuate but be ready. We started loading our trucks and loading up everything. And then kind of started grabbing and tossing.”

Dana, “I think we had twenty minutes. Our friend was up here. And that's whose car that is. We were loading my truck up. We were loading Josh’s truck up, and then we had a 4Runner that our friend drove out for us because our 4Runner, he said, is worth more than his car. He drove our 4Runner out.”

“Then we saw the sheriff come down the road,” Josh points out to Mud Creek Road. “He started honking his horn. He had horn and sirens and the megaphone yelling evacuation!”

Dana adds, “Then we got a text from a friend that said, get out. They’re going to close the road.

“We were watching Watch Duty. And we have a good friend whose older brother is one of the air attack bombers. He was contacting his little brother telling him, get out. So, he contacted us and said, you guys better get out.”

“We started down the road,” Josh picks up the story. “As soon as we got to Vose's, I ran into somebody that was already turned around.”

Dana explains that she did not turn around at Vose’s Antique Store. “I kept going. I was like, I'm making it down this hill. And no, I was stopped and turned around right by the Welcome to Cohasset sign. You could see flames coming up. I had a plane go right over me. I was like, oh shit, I better turn around. And I turned around and met back up with you.” She says to Josh.

Courtesy “Hippie” Josh Mossi. July 24, 2024, in the “narrows”. 7:38 p.m.

She continues, “The fire department said, turn around. We're going to meet you guys at the school. I'm a board member of the Cohasset Community Association and that's kind of what we always said the staging area would be, right? Once we all parked there, a few people broke away saying, screw this, I'm going back to my house. I'm going to make a stand. I remember because one guy was like, I've got plenty of clearance.”

Josh nods. “There’s too many trees down there, at the school. For the amount of people we had, that would not have been a safe place to make us stay.”

Dana, “We were collecting cars pretty quick. We were told the firetrucks were following us. But they didn’t. We waited and nothing.”

Josh, “I’m like, well, we'll go to the TV towers and wait.”

Dana affirms the decision. “He knows the backroads so well. I never really felt scared. Honestly, I can say that. I know he's driven the back roads so much. I've gone with them, too. There’s, you know, two or three ways out. And the way the wind was blowing the fire. I knew enough to know that we were going to get out. It just might take a little longer. So, we collected our friends who live on the greenbelt. And then we went to the radio towers. There were a lot of people there.”

Josh, “When we got to the radio towers, there was people just stopped in the middle of the road, and they were blocking the road. There was a lady running around screaming, we're all going to burn! I had to tell her, calm down, calm down. The fire is behind us. Get back in your vehicle and move your vehicle off the road. We're going to go to the helipad. And she's like, where's that? I'm like, it's up the road. Another four miles. We'll be fine. She moved and then the people moved behind her.

“I was able to lead them out through there. I told everyone, we're going to keep going. Let's all go to the helipad.” He muses on this, explaining his thought process. “Because if we get up there, we at least have a clear opening. In a worst-case scenario, they can drop on us.”

Dana, “I knew I was going to lose service at that point on my cell phone. I texted my mom, said, hey, I'm going to be okay, you know we didn't get out. Then I called 911, and I said, I don't know if you guys know this. I'm going up to the helipad. I've got about 50 to 100 cars with us. Somebody needs to know where we're going. And the lady's like, okay, you're going up to the helicopter pad. I said, yeah. And I don't know how fast the fire is moving at this point.”

Josh agrees, “That was the thing.”

Dana, “We have no idea if it's on our heels or whatever. I told her, we're going to be at the helipad and if the fire is coming up on us you guys are going to have to start dropping on us, dropping water, because this will be our last stand, right? Because this is it.

“It was still light, not dark yet.”

Josh, “It started to get dark once everybody got gathered up there at the pad.

“Earlier, I had messaged Justin (Autrey) and said, hey, we're evacuating. He said they were, too. And that was before we knew we were going to get turned around. Right? But I was like, if we get blocked in, we'll go to the helicopter pad.

“Once we got to the helicopter pad, we started helping. Hey, who needs gas? I had extra gas, and we were filling up people's tanks.

“I blocked the road going down from the helicopter pad to get out. You know, like the Deer Creek Way. I blocked that way with my truck, so nobody would go past us. We needed to wait for Justin. He knows these roads like the back of his hand. I didn't want anybody going until we could find everybody and make sure everything was okay.”

He takes a breath. “This was all people who had never been to Deer Creek and half the people had never even been to the helicopter pad.” He begins listing off the vehicles gathered: trucks with trailers, a loaded fifth-wheel horse trailer, RV trailers, and a majority of two-wheel drive cars. “We just went to every vehicle and talked to them.”

Dana was part of the process of calming those gathered. “Panic will get you killed. Fear will get you killed. I grew up in a military family. I know structure helps keep you calm. But we could see smoke, we could see the smoke.”

Josh, “And we could see the red glow through the trees. It was down in the canyon, burning up on both sides.”

Dana, “There were just so many people. Just waiting. Some of them got out of their cars and were like, oh, my God, we're so glad to see you guys. Then everybody started showing up.”

Josh acknowledges that they were no longer waiting for police or fire personnel. They were waiting for Justin. “I don't think we were really waiting for anything once Justin showed up. We were like, we're getting out. It was Cohasset doing what we do. The more cars showed up, you could feel more of the anxiety in the air. You know, the more cars that come up, the more people are like, what's going on? What are we doing? What's happening? You can only calm down a crowd so much. Once everything started moving again, that was the important part, to do something, that helped. People see that something is happening.”

Josh explains that it was at this point he knew he had to find Justin in the crowd. “Then we had a bunch of people there. It started bottlenecking again. We got like a hundred cars. I'm going to start going back through. We didn't know who was with us and who wasn't. Once we started going back through, we found Jamey and Rita and Justin. I was like, get you guys to the front. That’s when that Sierra Pacific guy had come up and came through and said, hey, the roads are open.”

Dana talks about the in-the-moment experience. “We knew the roads were open. Now it's just organize and structure and put everybody in line.”

Josh has taken a long pause in the story, shaking his head. “It was the grace of God and luck that they had been logging. The roads were widened, and they were clear. Otherwise …” he trails off. “You know, when we reached the first Sierra Pacific camp there were guys down there. Their trailers, everything. And they were standing on the road waving at everybody. And I'm like, you know, they're not panicking. We're cool. At that point, we're cool. We just have to get out to 32. Obviously, they're not panicking. The fire is not coming up on us anymore. I hope that that resonated, the fact that they're waving and smiling at everybody, I hope that resonated with other people. We’re okay at the moment. That helped me. We're not running from a fire right now.”

As with most residents of Butte County, Josh and Dana count Camp Fire survivors amongst their friends and families. Dana had worked at Feather River Hospital in Paradise before transferring jobs just two months before the Camp Fire. She says, “My brother worked up there. My sister-in-law worked up there. My best friend lived up there. The videos and things that we saw were crazy, you know?”

The horror of the Camp Fire played a major role in the decisions that “Hippie” Josh made the night of the Park Fire. He explains, “That was my main thing. I just wanted to make sure that we could get out and nobody got killed. That was the whole reason why we didn't stay at the helipad, too. At that point, we hadn't seen any firefighters or nobody. It was just one Sierra Pacific guy who said the gates are unlocked. And he kept driving past us.”

Dana, “I don't know, he had some other objective to go to because he was driving. And then I know after our group came out, there was another group that was led by, I think, Sheriffs and Sierra Pacific.”

Dana has no question they did what had to be done in those moments at the helicopter pad. “When I hit the Welcome to Cohasset sign trying to get down, I could see the flames shooting across the road. So, the fire's right there. You know, the fire is right here. And you're just kind of like, that's close. It's too close.”

Josh agrees. “We’re surrounded by two canyons and it's burning in both canyons. I'm thinking we gotta go. We gotta get out of here.”

He returns to the evacuation itself. “When we got to the end, at Highway 32, I stayed. I stayed and waited until the last vehicle came through. I had our friend Tony drive at the end of the line to help anybody who gets stuck. He had a four-wheel drive Jeep, and he could pull people out. That way we would also know where the end of the cars were. It took about three hours for everybody to get out after we got to Highway 32.”

The group left the helicopter pad around 8 p.m.

Dana, “Once we got to the end, it was like what? Midnight? One? They started telling people to go up to Chester because 32 was closed going down to Chico. But we sat there for a couple of hours waiting. By that time, they were sending them down to Chico. I just wanted to make sure –”

“Everybody got through,” Josh finishes.

Dana, “The way down, to Chico, you could see the whole Upper Park on fire. It was tragic, you know, to see that.”

Josh counted eighty vehicles. He had to know everyone got out safely. He says, “There was families. There was whole families. I stood right at the road there where everybody was coming out. People were getting out of their vehicle, hugging me, thanking me, and yeah.” He mentally tallies. “So there was oh, it had to have been, it was over a hundred people.”

“Over a hundred,” Dana reiterates.

The reality of the situation is shocking. Still.

“We were lucky.” Josh is adamant about this. “Luck largely based on coincidence. Had the loggers not been there the roads would have been unpassable for most of the people and that could have had major consequences, possible fatalities!” He wants us to pay attention, to be proactive. “If anything valuable can be learned from our situation to help future tragedies it’s that we cannot rely on coincidence to ensure people’s safety.”

But there are no coincidences or luck in the sheer fact of Cohasset tenacity. Neighbor helping neighbor. Justin, “Hippie” Josh, Dana, Tony. Others. Local knowledge of the logging roads and timberlands. The desire to help one another, to make sure that everyone was cared for and considered. The heartfelt concern of those who knew they could evacuate safely for those who needed to be reassured of that.

The humility of all involved is both inspiring and encouraging. Let’s pay attention. Let’s be beholden for and in gratitude to those among us who, when faced with an extraordinary challenge, rise to its calling.

Josh has the final word, “It was a group effort. It took all of us.”

“Hippie” Josh & Dana

Hazel

Susie