‘It’s gone’: Creek Fire ‘tornado’ destroys beloved 71-year-old Huntington Lake cabin
Lynne Rodriguez was just a girl when her father built the family cabin 71 years ago at Huntington Lake using all kinds of odds and ends.
The late Alfred Smeds, a Reedley grape farmer, and others constructed it using a metal roof that once sheltered a chicken coop, and old doors, windows, cabinets and sinks. Even the fireplace bricks were recycled, “and this was long before the used-brick craze,” she said with a laugh of their summer retreat, built in 1949.
“I don’t know if all farmers do this,” she said, “but the ones that I know salvage things and they save them in case they need them for something, and just about everything at the cabin was something that had been repurposed.”
It was a “hodgepodge,” but a beloved one. On Monday morning, they learned definitively that it was gone.
“That does look like a piece of the roof — oh yeah, it is,” the Clovis woman told her husband, Lanny Larson, as he showed her a photo he’d just received of ruins in that area. Their cabin is one of hundreds leveled by the massive Creek Fire burning in eastern Fresno and Madera counties, now just 18% contained after consuming more than 220,000 acres since the start of Labor Day weekend.
Lynne said she’s lived through harder losses – the death of her first husband and child – but its destruction still hurts.
The news hit her granddaughter, Lynsey Rodriguez of Fresno, harder. Lynsey was at the cabin with her boyfriend and his family Sept. 5 when the first evacuation orders were issued.
Talking about the loss Monday morning, Lynsey paused many times to wipe back tears. They started when she recalled the phone call with her grandma before evacuating, who told her not to worry about taking anything from the house before they left.
There’s so many things now Lynsey wished she had grabbed, including a wooden carving of her great-grandparents who immigrated from Finland sailing on Huntington Lake with their family, and a watercolor painting of the cabin.
She said the hardest part of the past week has been waiting to hear what happened to 35 Upper Line Lane. “Not knowing for so long. … I just felt so helpless.”
Damage assessment within Creek Fire evacuation zones is approximately 55% complete, officials said.
Surveying Huntington Lake damage after fire tornado
The photo of their leveled cabin came 10 days after evacuations began at the start of Labor Day weekend. They learned of a rare “fire tornado” a few days ago that tore through clusters of cabins in their small High Sierra community above Shaver Lake.
An initial survey by the Huntington Lake Volunteer Fire Department listed 75 homes along Huntington Lake as destroyed, with the Kennolyn Camps area, Upper Line and Huckleberry tracts hit hardest. The Smeds cabin was one of just two homes reported as destroyed “pending confirmation with drone photos.”
“We were able (to) visualize almost all areas, however in the northernmost portion of Upper Line it was unsafe for even us to enter, and we used a drone to fly over those five cabins,” their report shared Saturday said. “Due to the intense smoke that fills the basin what you see on the Upper Line map is our best estimation of which cabins were destroyed.”
Much of the damage is along streets off Huntington Lake Road, west of Lakeshore Resort on the north side of the lake. On Sunday, Bee journalists surveying the bottom of the Upper Line Creek tract saw just chimneys and twisted piles of metal and debris scattered across a blackened, smoking forest.
Some trees on the ground had roots ripped from the ground, what firefighters said was caused by the fire tornado, with the Creek Fire creating its own weather.
Inscribed in the cement foundation of another now-gone home there was the year 1959 beside the names Debbie, Tammy and Florence. Broken coffee mugs lay scattered nearby.
At another destroyed cabin above it, a small wooden bear holding a fish with the words “welcome” still stood beside rubble, including a destroyed fishing boat and a charred off-road vehicle.
Around the community, the forest was still burning Sunday along both sides of Highway 168, including one large flare-up on a ridge near China Peak Mountain Resort, which was previously described as mostly intact.
The owners of landmark Cressman’s General Store located below Shaver Lake, along with firefighters battling the Creek Fire, are among the many who have lost homes and businesses to the wildfire.
Fire officials said at least 650 structures have been destroyed by the blaze – a few hundred more than were reported last week. On Wednesday, 9,934 structures remained threatened, with thousands still displaced from their homes.
Looking for gratitude after wildfire evacuations
As Lynsey waited to learn what happened to her family’s cabin, she started volunteering at Clovis North High School as it became a shelter for dogs and cats evacuated from the Creek Fire. She said that helped her a lot.
“I think this whole process is about trying to find the gratitude to kind of keep you afloat,” Lynsey said, “and there’s a lot of good memories to look back on and bolster you up when you’re at the low points. … I’m very grateful for the firefighters and everybody who tried to do their best and continued to do that to help me and everybody else.”
Their cabin is in a remote area where snowplows don’t go in winter. September is near the family’s normal end to Huntington Lake vacation time. Lynne said she’s not being deprived of anything right now. That will change at the start of next summer. Lynne doesn’t think they will rebuild the cabin for various reasons, including that it wasn’t insured.
“I am finding myself remembering a lot of things that I hadn’t thought about in years because you know it’s gone,” Lynne said, “and you think of all the things that you used to do up there.”
For the family that meant lots of fishing, reading, playing in a creek beside the house, and exploring Sierra National Forest.
She said if she had told her granddaughter all the things there with sentimental meaning, she would have never gotten them all in the car. Lynsey began preparing to leave the cabin the morning of Sept. 5 – then out of an abundance of caution – expecting to be able to return shortly later. She’d just arrived the night before, anticipating a fun-filled three-day weekend.
Among what Lynne thinks of now: Cabin curtains and cushions made by her grandmother and many things she knit using leftover yarn of different colors. There was also a cane that belonged to her grandfather that Lynne would use later in her own life after a surgery.
“It will take awhile for things to really sink in,” she said. “It takes awhile to really hit you.”
Of Creek Fire smoke also blanketing their homes in the central San Joaquin Valley, her granddaughter said that’s become “just a haunting reminder of what’s happening still – and I don’t think there’s a person in the Valley who doesn’t have this fire on their mind at some point in the day.”
Yet she’s found some solace, too.
“The thing that stands out to me the most right now is how great the community has been, and how warm and generous,” Lynsey said. “We’ve all been able to come together. … The generosity is unbelievable, and this wasn’t even our main residence. I can only imagine how much worse it would feel for people who lost their actual homes.”
There’s also a strand of hope in the midst of tragedy.
“I just hope because of this fire we do see some kind of change … as far as forestry management or legislation to make things safer, and shining a light on the effects of climate change,” Lynsey said. “I just hope some good will come from this historic fire that we are all experiencing together.”
This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
