Mark & Rachel
October 22, 2024
Story collected by E. Vegvary and Karyl Clark
Written by E. Vegvary
We turn at the Cohasset landmark intersection where Vose’s Antique Store stood for eighty years before it was destroyed in the Park Fire, and begin heading northeast up Vilas Road. Once a bucolic winding drive through black oak and mixed conifer, past open meadows, and water elements such as seasonal creeks and ponds, the drive is now a devastating landscape of ruined trees, scorched earth, and ash-filled house foundations.
On the corner of Vilas and Harvey roads, there are two RV trailers parked in the Wolford meadow. Rachel has offered the spot to several burned-out residents. We head up Harvey Road and turn into the gate. The loss here is total. All the hand-built structures laid waste.
The three-story barn home, a cabin, a horse barn, and a gym.
Mark and Rachel Wolford have been building their life together on this property for over two decades. Mark, sixty-nine, and Rachel, fifty-one, worked from home. Mark’s sawmill operation has been burnt to the ground.
We park and Rachel meets us. We walk up to where the couple are now living. Rachel points out a towering stack of hay. She lost sixty-six bales of hay in the fire. This ton has been donated. She shakes her head, saying, “My goal is to be back on my feet in three years and give back to all these people who’ve given to us.”
A fifth wheel trailer plugged into a humming generator is nestled beneath a brand new and nearly completed roofed structure with a deck. Horses are content inside a temporary chain link corral. Three Australian shepherds chase anything that will be thrown for them. We walk past stacked lumber and climb cinderblock steps to sit on the deck. Mark comes out of the trailer, wearing oxygen. The resilience of this couple is overwhelming.
Rachel tells us, “From the very beginning, I felt like I just want to go home. You know, that was it. I just want to go home. He needed to go home. We needed to be here.”
She continues, “Friends who are already held up in town have their leases. I worry about their mental health and their struggle. They seem so depressed or angry. I just feel like we've always been doers. That’s part of our processing - that we just do. And it's very healing. There's a lot of emotions involved right now. When you leave for a while, you become detached from it. I think people move on and have to go to what's easier.”
Mark and Rachel Wolford returned to their property as soon as the evacuation order was lifted. Their forty acres are located on the eastern side of the Cohasset Ridge. Vilas Road was a flashpoint of destruction on Thursday, July 25th, when the Park Fire ran from both the west and the east side canyons that flank Cohasset ridge.
Later, Rachel would mention Vilas Road. “I would always say to Mark that I could never get sick of driving up and down the hill because it begins and ends with Vilas. After the fire, when we were allowed back up again, the first time I ever cried over our return was the day they took out this beautiful sugar pine that stood out on the road I hadn’t really cried yet being back at our property but seeing that tree cut down sure broke my heart.”
Rachel describes the progression of the Park Fire as it came up out of Musty Buck the second day, Thursday afternoon. “You hear that freight train sound. I had remembered a firefighter talking about that freight train noise one time, and it is the most horrible thing because it's like a million freight trains as it grows. And I just screamed for him to get downstairs because--”
“I was taking a nap,” Mark finishes.
A week after the Park Fire completed its destructive path through Cohasset and Campbellville, Sheriff Kory Honea split evacuation zones in upper Cohasset into A’s and B’s. 250A, 251A and then the B’s. The A’s had their evacuation orders changed to warnings the first day of August, allowing residents to return home eight days after the fire began.
The B’s were forced to wait until the following week because the overwhelming majority of them would not be returning to standing houses.
Even fewer have returned to camp on their property. The County charges the landowners a $750 permit for the privilege. Rachel and Mark discuss the frustration of working with government agencies.
“We still don't have power. So, the deal with that is we did the power pull and everything and it was permitted and all that stuff—"
Mark interrupts, “But the permit was exorbitantly expensive!”
Rachel agrees. “You have to pay all your permits again. A permit to camp here. We paid that.”
Mark growls, “And that makes no sense.”
Rachel admits, “I paid it because, here’s my thing, it's a temporary housing permit. I’m going to have to pull all that to build anyway, which we're doing with the manufactured home. I was going to have to do that anyway, because you have to pay it all again.” Now she gets angry. “And I know when I have time in life, there's got to be advocating, going to Butte County supervisors and saying, I understand the processing fees, but there's got to be a certain amount of a discount on doing stuff that you've already paid for. When you’ve already paid.”
Mark is disgusted. “They have you by the short hairs. Because if I had just said, no, I'm not going to pay anything, I'm just going to move onto my property, right? On the day that we would need permits to put in a manufactured home or to rebuild or whatever, that's when they would nail me with fines and penalties and all this stuff.”
Rachel, “I did the permit because we were going to develop anyway. He was kind of adamant at first. I have the right; I should be on my property. I'm like, you're also on oxygen and we're not young, and we can't scramble off of here and have the time to argue with people in case they do decide to come and enforce.”
Mark, “I know if I was younger and I could build a home again real quick, I would take that approach. Stay off!”
The Wolford’s knew they would be facing total loss. Mark had watched their property burn to the ground. They had driven away at 2:30 the afternoon of July 25, with five horses and three dogs and very few of their precious possessions. They had a two-horse trailer and unfortunately, Rachel’s requests for help trailering her horses off the hill were impossible to fulfill because the road had been closed to uphill traffic Wednesday evening. The couple had to load two of the horses and tie the other three to the back of the trailer. An excruciatingly slow evacuation. Mark informs us that horses can walk about two miles an hour.
That evening they would walk twenty miles before they reached safety.
And by the time they arrived at Odyssey Winery in Chico, Zuni, Rachel’s mustang would need emergency veterinarian care.
Courtesy Rachel Wolford. Thursday afternoon, July 25, 2024
Twenty years ago, Rachel, an avid horsewoman, found and purchased the Harvey Road property with a friend. The two women kept horses on it and used it for trail riding. Once Rachel and Mark became a couple, they bought out Rachel’s friend. “That was always the plan,” Rachel explains. “Suzie is amazing. An amazing woman and such a good friend.”
Mark moved his chainsaw mill onto the property. “I brought up my chainsaw mill because all I had was my chainsaw mill. Started milling for the big three-story barn if you remember what that looked like.”
The gorgeous structure was recognizable to anyone driving up Harvey Road to the Cohasset Cemetery.
“Yeah. That was built with my chainsaw mill. Oh my God. My original old chainsaw mill.”
“The finish woodwork inside, we did with the first bandsaw mill that we had and then we got this sawmill and built a beautiful barn there and built a cabin which was right here. It was sitting right here.”
Courtesy Rachel Wolford
“We're hopefully getting our mill Friday. It's been a long time since I've built with commercial lumber. I really dislike it.” In just several months’ time, the couple have built the roof and deck for the trailer they’re now living in.
“I've been building for years with my own lumber, my own trees. Cut the way you want.
Two barns, two homes. And the fire took the sawmill, the entire operation. But the sawmill company, Wood-Mizer, I can't say enough about them being a great company because they are replacing the entire sawmill operation. I had no idea. We had financed it through them. We almost paid it off.”
Rachel explains, “I thought the insurance was just going to cover their end.”
“They said, no, we're going to replace the entire operation. It’s already been built, we just need to go down and pick it up,” Mark finishes, visibly moved.
But the couple have been forced to concede to their situation, and to the reality of Mark’s lung disease. They allowed Rachel’s mother to help them finance a manufactured home.
Rachel says, “My mom can't have us in a home fast enough. After the fire, all I really needed was somebody here for a few days to watch the animals while he had a bronchoscopy at UCSF that we couldn't avoid any longer.
“It was right after because his lungs were so bad after the fire. My mom ended up showing up here.” She pauses, “That whole time was so confusing. I kept asking her to just be here with the dogs so I could go spend the night with him, because there was a fifty percent chance of him being hospitalized from the procedure. She was like, well I'm coming for a month, and I got an Airbnb. You guys can stay with me. I told her I’m out on forty acres feeding my horses. I can't stay in an Airbnb.” Rachels smiles affectionately.
“She came for a month, and she fed us, which was good. But she wanted…. well, she’s doing a loan with us. We're just getting a smaller 1,200 square foot manufactured home that'll go in the same place as the barn house was. We’re finalizing our loan next week.
Hopefully, we're in something by June 1st. I think it'll be like record-breaking for people with fire losses to being in a home.”
She continues, “It was so crazy post-fire. You can scramble and spend all your time gathering up any gift card you want to, but our minds were about how do we get here and how do we get a permit process going.
“I would preferred to have done something like Title 25 if we were ten years younger and without a lung disease. That's what they did after the Camp Fire in Concow. build your own structure. Still with a permit, more limited building inspections, but with your own lumber. I would have just built something five hundred square feet, gotten the County out of here and then done what I want to do.
“I can't stand the fact that I'm having another mortgage, but it's what we have. Mark is hopefully listed for a lung transplant; his disease is really unpredictable. A cold put him in the hospital last year. It's very unpredictable. We have this experience of oh, your lungs really have no extra capacity anymore to take care of themselves.
“My mom’s whole thing is - we need to be in a home. Because if a transplant comes up like that, we need to have a house.
“As soon as the fire hit, Mark went into the craziest shock I've ever seen and was nonfunctional for two weeks. Normally he's my support system on things, you know. And so that was weird. My mom's a fixer. My mom is our miracle.”
Courtesy Rachel Wolford
Mark and Rachel’s evacuation story is harrowing, featured in local, state, national and international news. It was both better and worse than the published accounts and photographs tell.
Rachel begins, “So the day of the fire, when everybody was evacuating, my only wish was to get all the horses out. I only had a two-horse trailer for five horses. In the scramble of thinking that through, I got hold of Brandy Brooks. Then I got hold of my farrier who had a three-horse, and he was going to head up. He said I think they're closing it down, though.
I'm like, just tell them you're coming up for a resident. I already had Mark loaded with our two-horse. That was our first day. The only other option was up the road with everybody else. I didn't have the gas for it, and I was not going to leave a horse behind. I was also not going to subject three of them to walking up to Chester, basically. So, it wasn't an option.”
Butte County Sheriff’s office wasn’t letting anyone drive up the hill after the fire crossed Cohasset Highway Wednesday evening. Without being able to trailer all five horses out, the Wolford’s had to make the decision to stay on the property the first night, despite the evacuation orders. Mark tells us, “We saw the sheriff’s deputy. They came to the house; said we should leave.”
Rachel talks about their thought process Wednesday into Thursday. “The winds were very favorable that day. I felt like we were going to wake up hearing twenty percent containment. I really thought that was going to happen from living up here this long. I was like, they are just not going to let this…” she breaks off mid-thought.
Mark picks up, “We followed the fire news. I was looking at what it would do depending on what the winds were doing. And I've been in the mountains all my life. I know that sometimes fires develop wind patterns on their own and do things that are unpredictable.”
The couple and the majority of the community have the same questions. How did the Park Fire, eighteen miles away, spread so rapidly and destructively. Was there a drone that momentarily halted air attack? If so, why hasn’t the drone operator been prosecuted? Why has the community not been debriefed by Cal Fire? But for Mark and Rachel, and all those who suffered devastating loss to the wildfire, there is no time to dwell on questions of this nature. There is no emotional space for it.
Rachel begins again, “Then the next morning, I don't think we slept a lot that night, I did other things, like I started writing my name and number on each horse’s halter, because I didn't know what was going to happen. If I had to leave the horses behind, which was really not a choice for me, I knew I was supposed to do that.” Animal rescue groups encourage identifying your animals with your name and phone number in case they need to be left behind, or let go, or escape.
Rachel continues, “We had one car and the truck and the trailer. I had at least ten gallons of water in the trailer for the horses because it was my brilliant idea earlier in the day,” she pauses, shaking her head. “This is what your head does when you're stuck in a fire. Thatwas before it was coming up Musty Buck. I said, well, we can always take Ponderosa and go down to the creek for the night because I didn't expect Musty Buck to get hit that way.
I’m talking with my friend Jesse going, is the gate open back there? Can I get the combo?”
She laughs at herself, “I'm setting up for horse camping, right? I don't know what I’m doing. I had two bales of hay and there's some water, all of Mark's oxygen equipment, and that was about it.
“I already felt anxious because it didn't seem like there was any air attack until about 10:00, 10:30 that morning. The winds started getting more erratic. While we were down at our barn the first set of air attacks began at Voses, I think? Because there was a run up that way. I felt fine when that began, thinking that’s good. And when the north end of the ridge started exploding there was an air attack all day, all afternoon there.
“Our neighbor Shawn kept going down to Vose’s to get updates. Mark kept driving out to see what the fire was doing. Every time he would drive out, I would pack something else because I was so anxious.”
Mark explains, “What happened is, that fire was no longer down at Jack Rabbit Flat. There was so much concentration on the north end and Woodhaven Drive. That whole area was on fire. You could tell it was just raging up the canyon.”
Rachel picks up. “Mark would go out and he's like, it's still down at Limpach. Shawn swears he talked to everybody, and they all said it’s down at Limpach. And I remember there was a moment where Mark went to go take a nap, and I was bringing the horse trailer down. I thought to myself, that fire is not being held at Limpach and I don't care what anybody is saying. I looked down the road and I texted Erica, Shawn’s wife. I said, are you looking at what I'm looking at? The fire is all the way up Musty Buck Ridge. It is not at Limpach. I told her I was leaving, which was around 2:30, somewhere around there. When we left it was nothing but a mile long swath of black smoke. It was huge. I’ve talked to Brian about this, am I remembering it right?!
“That was when I screamed at Mark to wake up. I told him to stand right by the trailer, and I was just going to keep bringing him horses. We got two loaded up. He got the dogs in the car, and we started heading out. The other three horses were tied to the back of the trailer.”
Mark says, “We're doing our slow evacuation out. The fire actually went clear around us.
We had to hole up while it was burning. One hundred percent around us.”
Courtesy Rachel Wolford
Rachel, “We’re moving slow. We get just north of Limpach and we're stopped because the fire jumped Limpach over to North Point. We get put on two small acres that are pretty much cleared. It was Charlie Brooks, Brandy's uncle, who owns at the front there, a nice newer little single wide. We got stuck there with the horses. I had a baby pool with me, so the firemen filled it up with water, which was nice. We were stuck there maybe four to five hours. The fire was just all around, just everywhere. I think they actually tried to push it, tried to get control over it. Keep it from coming all the way up and hitting the Cohasset store? I don't know what their game plan was, but there was an intentional moving it, pushing it north, back across Cohasset Road again.”
Mark, “When it got to the northwest side of Cohasset Road - what was so freaky? Some of those neighbors that have been there for years, the amount of ammunition they had, it sounded like we were in the middle of a war. I mean like machine guns going off nonstop for a half hour. That was nuts. Poor Abby. She doesn’t like gunshots; she was curled up in a ball in the back of the car.” He pets the dog. “And then all the cars that were left here.
Their gas tanks start blowing up and its huge explosions. And the tires blew up. It was just crazy, the amount of explosions.”
Rachel, “We sat there the whole time. Just the two of us sheltering. The other people who were evacuating at the same time? They let those cars go through. Because we were so slow with the horses, they held us up. I watched Brandy's property just go up in flames.”
Mark, “And it's coming right at us at that point.”
Rachel, “We had a really nice fifty, sixty-foot clearance of nothing, just gravel until this tree line. But it was so hot, and that tree line just ignited. That's what happens. The only people who saved their homes here were dousing them with water because the heat alone ignites everything. When that line of trees lit up, I said, Mark, get in the truck. We’re leaving now. I was in the car at that time with the dogs. I pull up on the road, the firemen said you can't go.”
Mark says he told them simply, “Yes, we can.”
They both take a breath. Rachel clarifies, “I say we’re going. I just found out….” Another breath. “Mark had…In the middle of all of this Mark tells me, Rachel, I want to go up to the neighbor’s place and get his gas where he said he had gas. Because I was almost out of gas.
I'm like, Mark, there's nothing there. It burned, you know?
“But I knew he just wanted to go see. And he went. He came back and he said, everything’s on fire.”
Mark, “I drove up in the middle of the whole fire, past where they had stopped everybody.
I drove up and then went through the fire and just looked at everything as it's going, you know. I saw this house burning.” He’s referencing his own home. “I came up and I saw everything going. Our barn going, the house going. We used to have a really nice fitness center, a gym, there, and it was…it was going. Everything was going. So, I went back down, and I just said everything's gone.”
Rachel, “He came back, and he told me that. I was on the phone.” She begins to cry. “I feel really bad about how much I stressed out my kids. Over and over, I feel bad about that.
We all have Life360. Aliyah is starting to follow me leave. And then she saw me stuck. So, she's worried about that.”
Mark points out, “She’s up in Reno.”
“I’m on the phone with her. I tell her Mark just said we lost everything. The last thing she heard me saying was I got to go. The fire is coming. And it's because that line of trees combusted. We get out on the road and the firefighters tell us; you can't go. I tell them, I just found out I lost my home. The safe two acres you put me on is burning. I'm going. So, we went.
“It was lucky for us they had spent time pushing it to the north side of the road, right?”
The ordeal continues. “This is that slow walk down the hill with the horses. The pavement was really hot for a section. But everybody got through it. I don't even know how that long it was, because all I remember really after that is that then we were down the hill some more and I don't know, I don't even know how some of the stuff happened.”
Rachel’s daughter, Aliyah reached out to a lifelong friend in Chico. The friend arrived with a three-horse trailer. Rachel talks about this. “They had gone through the police barricade to start getting up to us. Somewhere, a few more miles down the hill, I actually had a trailer there waiting!
“My mustang Zuni was shut down at that point, and he was not going to go in the trailer.
He’s blind in one eye, that was making it so much worse for him. I know he can load, but at that point it just turns into a big no. And then he got scared.”
Her voice becomes filled with pain, “I know better, but I mean this is just how the day went. I wasn't thinking straight.
“At this point we had sheriff deputies helping us. I told Mark, I said, let's tie him to the trailer. I'm going to run to town and get gas in the car. Oh, and get a phone charger because I didn't know where one was. Aliyah is still worried about me. She's now driving over from Reno with her fiancé to come meet us.
“I come back through the whole police thing and Zuni’s had an accident. One of the fire engines flew by too quickly. He pulled back on the lead rope and he went over a guardrail.”
Mark discusses the result. “He's a mustang. He’s so healthy. It cut way past the tendons, on both legs. But the tendons were so strong that they flexed and didn't get cut. So, he was able to walk normal.”
“But he was in pain,” Rachel says.
“And he was bleeding,” says Mark.
“I just started to walk down to the valley with my horse. The girls took the other horses out to acreage they had by Butte College. One of the girls somehow knew the guy at the Winery and had arranged the gate to be open for us to put Zuni and Anika there for the night. That was a lifesaver.
“In the last mile Aliyah shows up randomly on the road.” She smiles, visibly grateful.
“Everybody's getting through police barricades for us. She took Zuni and walked him the rest of the way so I could drive in the car. We got down to the winery, got those guys settled. Glad I had water because they didn't have water there.”
Odyssey Winery had been surrounded by fire the night before. The property had been saved by Cal Fire. The home and reptile business next door, Killer Clutches, was destroyed. Power poles had been burnt and there was no electricity.
Rachel, “We were finally in a hotel in Oroville after two in the morning because there was nothing left in town.
“That experience was so surreal. I just remember walking down the hill with Zuni, it’s pitch-black outside and all you see is red embers around you.”
Mark explains, “When you're in the middle of a traumatic event like that, you are not questioning anything. Nothing's going through. You're just in action. You're doing things.
Then later, all of that has to catch back up. Because you would normally be traumatized in the moment. You set it aside until your brain can process it, until you're in a safe place.”
Rachel finishes the story, the small miracles. “Zuni was there with Anika that night.
They've been together for so many years. I went to sleep. The next day Dr. Darling just shows up. Because of Brandy Grout. Because of Brandy.”
Sadly, two weeks later, Rachel was forced to say goodbye to her thirty-three-year-old mare, Anika. “At least I got to be there. It was so hard. I mean, twenty-three years with her. You know, she went through it her last few weeks. I know she did. Because of the fire.
That stress.” She is weeping now. “It makes you angry at the fire. It feels unfair.”
Mark finishes, “She's buried up here. Put her right into the trailer after she passed. And then brought her up here and buried her under her favorite apple tree.”
We briefly discuss Mark’s disease. Rachel clarifies, “It's officially unclassified interstitial lung disease.”
Mark interjects, “I was lifelong in construction. Back in the days when we didn't wear any protection dealing with asbestos and insulation. I destroyed my lungs.” He gets up from his camp chair, throws several toys for the dogs. He picks up a pneumatic nail gun and begins working on the brand-new structure that will insulate the trailer and allow the couple to over-winter in Cohasset on their beloved property. Their home.
Rachel continues, “But we had no idea. The problem with interstitial lung disease and pulmonary fibrosis is that most people don't know until they hit a tipping point. And last spring, we were cleaning out the barn. A couple days later, he can't breathe. He had had enough scarring where whatever started aggravating him from the barn just kicked him over.”
She shifts seamlessly into an emphatic tone. Her voice resounding with love for him and hope for their future. “Oh, we’re okay. We’re going to be really happy. I wish we were younger; you know. I wish Mark didn't have his health thing. He keeps me going. But, yeah, we’re happy.”
