October 9, 2024
Story collected by E. Vegvary and Karyl Clark
Written by E. Vegvary

Standing at the top of Watson Lane, on Sunrise Ridge, Lyle Johnson looks east, across the Big Chico Creek canyon. Mountain valleys and ridges unfold as far as the eye can see. “Didn’t use to have that view,” he says. “It was all trees. You could see the sun peeking up over Sawmill Ridge, sure.” He squints and points. “That’s Mann and Nolta. Lot of folks didn’t know Cohasset is ridges and canyons, ridges and canyons. They do now.” He turns away from the expansive burn scar that reveals the ridges and canyons, stretching thousands of acres eastward to Highway 32 and the town of Forest Ranch.

We’re in Cohasset. The Park Fire decimated this small mountain hamlet. Forest Ranch was threatened but escaped the destruction inflicted upon Cohasset. Forest Ranch lost a handful of homes on the edge of the canyon. Two hundred and fifty is the current count for Cohasset homes destroyed.

For years we’ve been told that Forest Ranch and Cohasset were the last two green ridges in Butte County. Now there’s one. And it isn’t the ridge that Lyle moved to when he was five years old. Fifty years of Cohasset living.

*Courtesy Lyle Johnson. The house he grew up in, outbuildings still on fire. July 25, 2024, 7:25 PM*

Behind us is where Lyle’s home once stood, but he grew up in a house about five parcels down the road. “I moved into the house on the corner. Did all my growing up there and went to Cohasset School, rode the school bus. They picked me up in my front yard.”

He bought this property from his uncle in 1995. “My Uncle Phil lived right behind me at 75 Ponderosa. I bought this from him, my dad and I. He and my uncle developed this place because I was working out of town. I was able to buy it as I was working construction in the Bay area. I bought this house at 27 years old.” He raised his family here.

These days, it’s just him and Turbo, his service dog. It was once a comfortable mobile home, with assorted outbuildings, collected cars, and his beloved water tender. Now all of it is gone, destroyed by the Park Fire.

On Watson Lane, three houses out of ten homes survived the fire.

“I'm going to say that on my road. I'm the only one rebuilding.

“Here's my jam. I'm not going to build with sticks because every house that burned was made out of wood. And what are we going to do? Build a whole bunch of new houses made out of wood? I'm going to build with a product called Insulated Concrete Forms. My house is going to go up three times faster than anyone else's. And the nickname is ICF. That's the big buzzword.

“It's not just going to be ICF walls. It's going to be a concrete floor. Concrete form walls and a concrete form roof. And there's many reasons for that. First off, completely non-combustible. You can sit there and blow fire at it 5000 degrees all day long. Nothing happens. Eight-inch-thick concrete. Wow. It's a 500-year legacy structure, yet it goes together with Lego blocks. Not counting pouring the concrete out; we could get the whole thing done in two days. Seven-day cure time. Then do the roof. Seven-day cure time.”

Lyle and four of his neighbors bivouacked on Watson Lane the morning of the second day of the Park Fire, Thursday, July 25. They stayed as long as they could. “They said, well, you're the firefighter. We're going to listen to you to tell us when it's time.” Their houses were standing when they left that afternoon, but the men were driven out by a fire moving so fast that lower Cohasset and the east side of Cohasset were destroyed by dusk.

“I was in the fire service for basically my whole life, you know. My dad got in the fire department up here when I was six. I grew up in this department. I was an explorer starting at sixteen years old in this department. I went to the fire academy, did the degree program at Butte. My dad and I had a contract firefighting business that was very successful. That's the last remnant of it right there.” He points across his property to the carcass of a truck. “Burnt to the ground. That truck's made four or five million in its life for us. Wow. I mean, I wish I got to keep it. Tactical water tender.”

He looks around at the ruined forest, the blackened trees. “There was not ever supposed to be this many pine trees. This has all been from logging practices going back to the 1900s. This,” he indicates his property, Cohasset, the entirety of the Lassen foothills, “has been harvested over and over. These are all 1900s ideas. This elevation, because of the logging, was converted from mixed oak woodland to pine forest and really should be 1500 feet higher in elevation. You should see this at Campbellville. Not here.

“Here it should be mostly oak trees. That's what needs to come back.”

The oaks are dead, but two and a half months after the fire, they triumph. Sprouting abundantly, vividly green in the monochrome landscape.

Lyle instructs about these native trees. “Oaks are the fire sprinkler of the forest. There's so much water in the oak canopy. So long as it's not November when they're dying, and the leaves just haven't fallen off yet. Oak trees, broadleaf oak trees. Not so much live oaks. Live oaks will burn, but black oaks will stop a running crown fire.

“These were green trees. Look at that.” He indicates the oak shoots. “It's all green, right? Yeah. Right after a fire, a little bit of rain. Boom. It's resprouted. That tree is dead. It's growing again at the bottom. The tree knows it's dead, you know.”

These trees were defenseless when the one-hundred-foot-wide onslaught of flame moved through the east side of Cohasset on the afternoon of Thursday, July 25th. And it was relentless.

“It was “choochin’!” Lyle says, then explains, “Firefighter speak for moving! Like a freight train.”

Lyle recalls the first day of the fire, Wednesday, July 24. “I was in Robinson Mill finishing up a generator.” He is a master electrician, journeyman, inside wireman. “I got the evacuation notice on my phone. I'm like, fuck, is this the day we're doing this? And I'm not home.

“I get to Forbestown Road,” he shakes his head. “Oh, this ain't good, man. I could see it all the way across county.

“I got the reverse 911 on my phone. I do have Watch Duty, but I wasn't really listening to my phone. But then the reverse 911 deal. They blow your phone up and set it on fire. You know, like Yo, dude, shit's going down. Sheriff's Department says, get the hell out. That's kind of how the phone yells at you. So yeah, I drove down Forbestown Road and I could see a 10,000 plus foot column, 15,000-foot column. And I'm like, oh, that ain't good. That ain't good at all. So, I burnt the brakes off my Suburban literally trying to get here. Hammer down baby.”

By the time he made it to Keefer Road, Cohasset Road was closed to uphill traffic. “I ended up getting in because I have a press pass from The Lookout. Zeke Lunder, he's a friend of mine. I'm the Cohasset correspondent that put a bunch of photos up from Wednesday night.

“Sheriff Kory Honea shows up at the roadblock and tells me and the Channel 12 guy we can go up. Then the Sheriff goes up and evacuates this neighborhood here. Right here! He makes himself a Sheriff's deputy and goes and does deputy things.” Lyle is emphatic that Sheriff Honea’s immediate emergency response to the Park Fire saved the lives of every Cohasset resident. An early evacuation warning at 3:00 became an order at 4:30. Sheriff Honea had deputies racing up Cohasset Road and down private roads with sirens on. Many evacuees remember seeing Sheriff Honea waving them on faster as they drove by him standing on the side of the road at Limpach. Some have reported he knocked on their doors and urged them to leave as quickly as possible.

Lyle says by 5 p.m., he saw only a handful of residents evacuating as he waited at the roadblock. “I think people cut out early or they didn't leave until the next day. Because the fire that was Wednesday was a low fire, but you weren't getting up and down the hill when it was breached. And when it crossed the road at 7 p.m., I got pictures that would peel your hair back.”

“I went in, and I checked on the reptile place. It had already burned down. It was already gone by that time. 6:00, 6:30. Yeah, it was gone. Wow. And fire was all over that area, it was moving north. Later on, the wind shifted to the east as it got dark. And that's when Cohasset Road was wanking. Yeah. It was choochin’ everywhere.

“I ended up talking to a guy named Rob Cone. He used to be Battalion Chief down in Chico, and he was also county training officer when I was a company training officer. Now he works for PG&E as a division chief. I stopped and talked to him. I said, well, I was up there, and it got a little sporty. He was like, yeah, I drove through it. It was pretty sporty, you know? And that's firefighter talk for what other people would be going, oh my God, how did you do that? Well, that's what we do.

“I went up as far as I could go. I got to the turnout quarter mile ahead sign. At that point, it was so uncomfortably hot through the windshield that I didn't even turn around. I ended up backing down the road about a mile.

He points over at the ruined tender. “I could back that thing up at 40 miles an hour. I've had to do it before. I had to pass a line of cars on a road job up on highway 70. That was a mile long line of cars. I'm in the closed part of the road and I'm going backwards. That thing's got like, multiple range transmissions. I'm in high gear in reverse going 40 hammer down and I'm just backing up and there's cars going ten miles an hour and I'm passing them going backwards. And you know I'm talking to the road guy like hey, hold these guys up a little bit. Here I come out in front of you. Here I come.” He laughs, “Yeah, here I go. Anyway, long story short, I ended up backing down the hill.

“It’s pretty impressive when you see both sides of the mountain on fire around you. Unbelievable.”

Wednesday night he stayed in Chico. “Me and Turbo are stuck down the hill. Can't get up the hill, but it looks like it’s kind of going to go around Cohasset. And it did. It burned from Upper Park to Deer Creek. Eighteen miles in twelve hours. And it kept up that rate of growth for four or five days straight. Fastest growing fire, fastest fire spread in the state history. That’s how we got to half a million acres. The Camp Fire was one acre per second. This was one and a half acres per second.”

The next morning, Thursday, July 25, he was back on the road trying to get up to the town he’d known his entire life. “I get up here, finally I get through the, you know, talk my way through the roadblock and I go up.” He drove through Cohasset, heading up Vilas Road. The town was unburned. He allowed himself to feel a cautious optimism.

“Coming back up out of the valley and we have the greatest air show. The fire had gone up Rock Creek all the way to Tehama County. But then the edge of the fire is now trying to crank up the hill into Cohasset. Through Rock Creek. So, we had an amazing air show. We had two VLATs, which is the very large air tanker, ten-thousand-gallon air tankers. Chico Air Attack Base has recently upgraded, now they’re able to fill the VLATs at Chico Air Attack Base.

“These guys are on a 20-minute cycle from dump to fill. They're flying right over us. And I'm listening to all the air traffic. And I'm listening to the regular incident traffic. And then I'm listening to Helco and Air Attack. And Helco is the air boss down by the park because they had six or eight helicopters down at the park working on that. And then we had seven or eight aircraft. I mean, we are hammering the Rock Creek side of this fire. That's why there's a green island up there. That air show saved all the main road from that destruction because of protecting, laying that down on Rock Creek. Putting down so much retardant because they had two VLATs there dropping 10,000. 10,000, 4000, 4000, 1200.”

At the end of the paved section of Vilas Road turning right onto Watson Lane, he encountered four of his neighbors who had either stayed through the night or found a way back home. They turned to him for guidance, and he laid out a simplified protection plan for their houses. And for their lives. He was the one who would call the shots. The men began setting up sprinklers, moving vehicles and belongings, hardening their homes at the eleventh hour.

Lyle continued to monitor the fire. He had two radios, GMRS and Cal Fire. He was also driving to the Ponderosa end of Watson Lane, up to Royal Forest Trail, keeping a close eye on the situation along the southeastern edge of Cohasset.

“When we were watching the fire over here. I'm like we're going to be all right. We're going to make this because I'm watching the air show. They're putting probably close to $100,000 an hour on this.”

He began to use his cell phone to monitor the air traffic. “I'm watching all the air traffic on Flightradar24 simultaneously. I'm watching up here. I know which one is the lead plane. I know the air attack and I can see all the tankers moving in real time, right? It felt good. It felt good watching them land at Chico air attack base. Pulling out of the air attack base. Taxiing down the other end of the line. Getting ready to take off. Awesome, awesome. And I'm looking. They got eight helicopters beating the shit out of it at Upper Park. This is all good.

“We're all talking about it. It's like, that looks great. That not so much. And at some point, around 1:30, I think the last time I went over there, I came back here. I loaded up as many things as I could stuff into the Suburban.”

*Courtesy Lyle Johnson. Looking south at Royal Forest Trail. July 25, 2024. 11:44 AM*

*Courtesy Lyle Johnson. Looking south at Royal Forest Trail. July 25, 2024. 1:32 PM*

*Courtesy Lyle Johnson. Looking south on Watson Lane. July 25, 2024. 1:51 PM*

From 11:30 until they evacuated at 2:00, Lyle watched the fire from the south grow. It doubled in size every hour until the last hour when it doubled in twenty minutes and he told them, that’s it, let’s go.

Lyle had a plan. “I already knew that it was black at Sigler Lane. Where the land of milk and honey is. Nothing's safer than black all around you. Yeah? Yeah. We gather up a little bit of shit, fire off the generator, light up the sprinklers on Ken Baker’s house and his garage and his barn.

“We’re out of there in a few minutes, get up to Jion and James, and I'm like, it's time to go. Okay, let's get in the car and go. They go into action, they start running. And because they had, you know, three houses there for them to deal with, I'm helping and Ken’s helping, we're all helping. Closing doors, battening down the hatches.

“Go rescue three dogs. Get bit by one of them. He's an old man and he knows me. But I had to take him. His owner was at work. I would not have been able to live with myself. You know, I don't care if he bites.

“We take off. No, we don't take off. It gets going kind of long in the tooth. I'm like come on, let's get the fuck out of here. I'm swearing, you know? I hear the air attack update. It looks like we got about ten minutes before it crosses Cohasset Road. Oh, God. And I'm like, get in the fucking car now! I dropped my phone. I'll buy you a new fucking phone. Get in the car now. It's time to go now! And I mean, I am getting irate and I'm running after people. Get in the fucking car!” Lyle is yelling the way he must have that day. “We leave together! We have a plan! We follow the plan! We go together now!” He takes a deep breath.

“We leave and we get down to Cohasset Road. And there's traffic. I mean it's going slow. I'm just thinking Paradise. I told the sheriff, I told Supervisor Doug Teeter, I told everyone, this is what's going to happen. There's going to be a clapped-out car that wrecks in the middle of this, and nobody can evacuate. We all die in our cars. And that's why we need to make Cohasset Road a safety zone. You're a dreamer, Lyle. You're a dreamer. That's what Doug Teeter told me.

“So here we are. Stuck. We're going three miles an hour. Two miles an hour. Time stands still like the Rush song says. We're coming down to the store. I can see past the corner and there's a dude at the front of the line walking a horse with his truck. That’s what’s holding everybody up. I'm in the rear. Okay, command decision time. I pass everyone and I'm waving at everybody. Follow me, follow me!

“There's no police. It's Cohasset regulating itself because of one guy in the front of the line. It's like rugged individuals.

“Now we got fire on both sides of the road. Following dozers. Down the middle of the road! Fire on both sides. We get down through there, right by Sigler. There’re fires torching trees, torching right next to us. And we get into the black.”

“Those three dudes got out of their cars with eyes this big. Man. Those guys were not used to driving through fire. It was hot enough that I had to roll my windows up and I couldn't have my arm on the armrest of the door. I had to put my hands down below, because the radiant heat coming through the window was burning me.

“It was choochin’, all right. Like a locomotive. It was choochin’.”

He grows quiet. “We made it through, and we all hugged, had a big group hug, and I sent them on about their way. I turned around and headed back up the hill.”

He swipes through his phone, pausing for a few seconds to study each photo he took that day. It’s apparent that he’s remembering the terrible dichotomy of leaving his home when it was still standing, to returning when all was lost.

“It took me two hours to get back up here.” He begins again. “I was able to drive back through the fire and get up to the store. Talked to a couple of battalion chiefs. I was wearing all Nomex. I had a Cal Fire radio, so I already had street cred. They're like, I don't know who you are, but it looks like you know who you are.

“I told them I'm here with The Lookout, but retired firefighter. What's the skinny up here? And one of them tells me, go to the little corner store up there. The battalion chief up there will give you the skinny.

“There's fire blowing across Cohasset Road on my way back in.”

Lyle had evacuated past Vose’s Antique Store on the corner of Vilas Road and Cohasset Road, an eighty-year-old landmark, at 2:40. At 4:50 when he drove up to talk to the battalion chief, the Vose’s property had been destroyed.

*Courtesy Lyle Johnson. July 25, 2024. Cohasset landmark, Vose’s Antique Store still on fire. A Four Runner abandoned at Vose’s by a Cohasset resident during the evacuation the day before. 4:50 PM*

“I talked to the chief. Told him I wanted to go up Vilas, get back up here. He said, Hey, you don't want to go up there yet. Why? Still real sporty up there. A fire guy talking to another fire guy. You don't want to go up there right now. Don't go up there.

“At that point I turned around and went back to town. Grabbed something to eat. Texted my family. And then came back up here that evening.

“There’s still fire burning when I came back. I got back to my place that night. Around 8:30. There's Jion's. I knew it made it. I knew my dad's place had made it for the time being. Baker's place was gone. When I saw Baker's place was gone, I was like, oh, yeah, my place - fucking gone. I knew at that moment I knew.”

On October 4th, Samaritan’s Purse came up to Lyle’s property to sift ash. They opened his gun safe. They located his computers. Lyle takes us over to where Samaritan’s Purse laid out the guns, lined up the computers.

At one point, he references the seemingly endless list of losses. He says, “This? This is just layers and layers. Like an onion. It makes you cry, and it peels off in layers.”

Lyle

Jesse & Jessie

Mark & Rachel