After the Fire

Finding Life Again Within the Burn Scar

After the Fire: finding life again in the burn scar. The Butte Fire Re-population, follow-up to Home Is Where the Horse Is: Surviving the Jackson Butte Fire Evacuation

The follow up story of the Jackson Butte Fire disaster, "Home is Where the Horse Is: Surviving the Jackson Butte Fire Evacuation of 2015". When the fire broke out on September 10th 2015, the author was forced to evacuate her ranch in the woods and try to take as many of her animals and possessions with her in the 15 minutes provided by the county sheriff. The evacuation itself was a disaster. But the follow-up story is heart breaking. A week to week journal of all that happened between re-population and the final settlement with the power company 2 1/2 years later, the story unfolds like a bad adventure novel. Everything seems to go wrong, from illegal tree poaching to gun fights and running for their lives. But the author lives to tell the tale, of bare earth and flooding rain and mud slides, to the ground turning green again with over-abundant brush and grass growth. Horses escape, and the feral cat finds her way back outside, even without her feet. An amazing often hair-raising, and sometimes heartening tale of survival and persevering against all odds in the burnt out wilderness of Calaveras county, California after the Butte Fire disaster of 2015, when 74 thousand acres were blackened in a matter of hours and lives were shattered or lost.