Creek Fire ravaged Fresno County foothills. Rebuilding is ‘a path of twists and turns’
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Five years after the Creek Fire, Fresno County rebuilt only a fraction of 856 structures.
- Shaver Lake residents navigate insurance, rising rebuilding costs and relocations.
- California wildfire trend shows intensified losses since 2017 and slow home recovery.
Five years after one of the largest fires in California history struck the Fresno County foothills, residents are still rebuilding their homes, lives and communities.
Only a fraction of the 850 structures destroyed by the 2020 Creek Fire have been rebuilt, according to county data.
Some residents sold their homes and left the area, as the mental and emotional toll of the fire was too great.
It took Susan Lea five years to build a new home that sits where her family’s 1960s timber cabin, once sat in the Pine Ridge mountain community. The blaze ravaged her family home and others nearby.
“It’s been a path of twists and turns along the way to get to a point of having a house again on the property,” Lea said.
The Creek Fire burned 379,895 acres, and destroyed 856 residential, commercial and other structures in its path, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. The blaze also damaged 71 additional structures.
The Creek Fire is the largest single, non-complex fire in Fresno County history, and was the largest in the state when it broke out. California experienced record-level wildfire activity in 2020, part of a “fire siege” that burned more than four million acres and destroyed over 11,000 structures.
The cause of the Creek Fire remains unknown, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
California’s wildfires have intensified in the last decade: 70% of the 20 most destructive wildfires in state history have occurred since fall 2017, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of CalFire data. Of the 22,500 homes that burned in the five most destructive California wildfires from 2017 to 2020, only 38% have been rebuilt, The Times found.
“There are some people who haven’t started to rebuild at all yet,” said Fresno County Supervisor Nathan Magsig, whose district includes the foothill communities.
Five years to return home for Pine Ridge resident
Lea, 70, a part-time resident of the Pine Ridge community, encountered an uphill battle in rebuilding her family’s cabin. Her roots in the mountain community go back generations: her grandfather had a gold mining claim along the Big Creek.
Her parents purchased the property in 1963. Her dad, a real estate appraiser for the county who held a degree in industrial arts from Fresno State, designed the timber-framed cabin.
A longtime Fresno resident and retired healthcare professional, Lea splits her time between the Valley, the Central Coast and the mountains. For years, she and four siblings have shared the cabin.
“We all had a role in building the house,” she said. “Even as kids, teens, we were involved with painting or staining or cleaning or being a second pair of hands for my father and his friends and family who worked on the house.”
The Creek Fire destroyed their mountain abode.
“The fire was so hot and extreme that it melted metal,” Lea said. “We could see the silverware that we had in a stream of silver on the ground.”
Fortunately, she said, the cabin had “really good insurance” through USAA. The family received a check for the full amount of the value of the house.
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Lea said the family initially planned to rebuild a timber home but final estimates from contractors were more than double their projected cost of $350,000. The cost of materials, number of homes that needed to be rebuilt in the area and complications of building in a wilderness area surpassed what insurance money would cover.
In 2022, the family decided on a more affordable manufactured home option. But the process came with its own challenges.
“Because we are on a one-lane road, bringing a pre-built home in required a very specialized driver,” she said.
The family had to talk with several manufactured home companies before they found a company with a driver that could bring it in. The cabin sits about three miles off of Highway 168 on Cressman Road, which is essentially a logging road built in the 1800s, Lea said.
So transporting the 50-foot manufactured home was “quite a feat,” she said.
The recent Garnet Fire, which broke out on Aug. 24 and burned more than 60,000 acres of the Sierra Nevada before its containment, renewed anxieties for mountain residents like Lea, who could see the fire from her deck.
“The fact we’re going through a similar experience brings up anxiety, uncertainty of the future,” Lea said in early September as the Garnet Fire blazed on the horizon.
How long will it take to rebuild?
As of Sept 29, Fresno County has approved 106 permits for rebuilding projects at various states of completion, according to data provided by county officials.
Some structures couldn’t be rebuilt, Magsig said. Others didn’t have sufficient insurance to cover the cost of rebuilding, like the beloved Cressman’s General store and gas station near Shaver Lake.
“Cressman’s is a perfect example of not having enough insurance to build back,” he said. Fundraisers have helped offset the cost of rebuilding, and the owners expect it to open in Spring 2026, owners Ty and Tara Gillet told ABC30.
Magsig said a silver lining of the fire is how it brought together and strengthened the Mountain community.
“It gave me hope for the future,” Magsig said, “because out of Fresno County’s greatest catastrophic event, you had heroes emerge, helping each other, and these are individuals that have remained friends to this day.”
He and other residents credited the Shaver Lake Church and Pastor Jim Dixon for their role in helping people navigate the fire’s aftermath. The church helped fund the rebuilding of 150 wells, Magsig said.
“They were the first ones on my doorstep with a $500 card for my parents [whose cabin burned in the fire],” said Pine Ridge resident Lynda Clayton Cuzzort.
‘This is home’
Clayton Cuzzort, 58, and her husband live in the hybrid, pre-fabricated home that sits on the former site of her family’s cabin that burned down during the Creek Fire.
Her father, Glenn Clayton, a former telephone company professional, saved up to buy the land and build a log-kit cabin on a seven-acre plot in the Pine Ridge community, one of the most impacted by the Creek Fire.
After the cabin was completed in 1990, her parents moved in full-time, relocating from their long-time home in Visalia. Over the years, she and her husband and their kids would head up to the family cabin for holidays and summertime.
“We came as often as we could,” she said. Even though they weren’t year-round residents before the fire like her parents, “we were very much part of the mountain community.”
Her mother, Caryl, hosted a bible study at the cabin. Her father fished, spent hours in his wood shop making toys to donate to local schools and raised money to buy Christmas gifts for children in need with the Pine Ridge Old Farts, according to his funeral GoFundMe page.
Clayton Cuzzort said her parents were able to safely evacuate days before the blaze destroyed their Pine Ridge community. But in the quick evacuation, they weren’t able to save anything. “Their entire life was gone, every memory, every memento, every book, every picture – it was just gone,” she said.
Clayton Cuzzort believes the emotional toll of the fire contributed to her father’s death on June 17, 2021. He wanted nothing more than to return to his mountain, she said.
“It was devastating, absolutely devastating, to see what that fire did to my mom and dad, like, mentally and emotionally,” she said.
Though her dad did not live to return to his beloved mountain, Clayton Cuzzort she promised she’d rebuild and return in his honor.
“And I kept that promise,” she said.
Clayton Cuzzort and her husband retired so they could return to the mountain full-time with her mom in February 2024. Since then, she has made an intentional effort to rebuild her community. She re-started her mother’s bible study at the cabin and serves as a dispatcher for Pine Ridge’s volunteer fire department.
While her mountain home isn’t the same, as it was before – there’s “not a tree in sight,” she said of her view – she’s committed to finding the beauty in the new panorama.
“It’s still beautiful, and I’m still so happy to be here, but it’s different. It’s hard. It’s the beauty-for-ashes type mentality,” she said in reference to Isaiah 61:3, a scripture passage about God’s power to bring hope after loss and sorrow.
Recently, her son got married, and she’s already thinking ahead for how future generations can use the home as a refuge.
“I want my kids to know this is home. This is safety. If you need to run, you need a safe place to be, you need comfort, you come to our home,” she said.
She plans to replant the burnt trees for future generations to enjoy.
“And one day, their grandkids will see trees again,” she said.
