Three miles away, Richard and I were in our cabin on the top of Inverness Ridge. We had just returned from Bali the previous night and now, looking afresh at our land covered with huckleberry, ferns and a thick forest of trees, we told ourselves how fortunate we were to live in such a place. We decided to cut down a dead tree. A friend, Scott Patterson, a volunteer for the Inverness Fire Department, stopped to give a hand. While we were talking he was paged. A vegetation fire had started on Mount Vision. It was 1:30 PM. He rushed off.

Within ten minutes we could see blue smoke in the valley below our cabin. We had a bad feeling about the direction of the wind and told our neighbor our misgivings. We decided to drive to the eastern side of Tomales Bay so we could observe and photograph the fire’s progress.

We drove up Highway One, north of Point Reyes Station, and parked at a pull-out directly across Tomales Bay from the brush fire. We saw a helicopter drop water, which it had picked up in a bucket from the bay, on the fire. After a few runs the helicopter had to refuel. An aerial bomber dropped fire retardant but shortly afterwards the fierce winds blew burning embers across the vegetation-choked upper canyon. Spot fires erupted in two locations in the next valley, which were much more difficult for the firefighters to attack. The combination of low humidity, high winds and a tinder-dry forest thick with undergrowth, soon made the conflagration unstoppable.

We watched in horror as the fire grew in intensity. Bishop pine trees, full of flammable oils and resins, exploded into flames as the fire spread through the tops of the trees. The sun turned red as the smoke increased. More helicopters and airplanes arrived to help. Finally we realized that the fire was definitely heading in the direction of our cabin and was completely out of control. We called neighbors on our cell phone. warning them of the possibility of impending disaster, then jumped into our car to go back to the cabin to retrieve some valuables. Our cabin is one and one half miles up a narrow, winding road. The road was strangely deserted, as the area was evacuated.
The light on the trees and bushes on our property was eerily orange. The smell of smoke was overwhelming, but we could not see the fire in progress. We had no idea how much time we had and ran up and down our hill trying to pack the car. We took paintings, bicycles, personal treasures. I had a large painting in the cabin but, in the anxiety of the moment, did not think to cut it off its stretcher bars and roll it up. We drove down Drakes View Drive, passing seven fire engines going in the opposite direction. There was a roadblock at the bottom of the road. Our timing was perfect.

We headed back across Tomales Bay for a front-row seat. It was a schizophrenic experience to watch Inverness Ridge burn. We knew hundreds of lives were in danger, our neighborhood was in flames, yet it was an awesomely beautiful sight. The moon was almost full, the ridge was black, the trees outlined in orange and red, huge billowing clouds of white and gray rising above the ridge line. Behind them, the sky was deep blue and the fire reflected red in the water of Tomales Bay.

The fire had at first been contained to two and one half acres. Winds of 50 mph caused the first fatal jump. From that moment, it became extremely difficult to fight. More than 2,100 people from 100 agencies all over California were brought in to fight the blaze. Forty-eight homes were destroyed and moe than 12,000 acres of Point Reyes National Seashore (about 17 percent of the park) were burned. Fortunately, the fire traveled down to the Pacific Ocean rather than into the town of Inverness. The wind never permanently changed direction towards Tomales Bay, thus saving many more homes. There were only 12 minor injuries and many pets were saved.

Living on the top of Inverness Ridge was like living with a time bomb. There had not been a serious fire there for more than 60 years. The bomb went off and lives were shattered. Perhaps it will grow more beautiful as the bishop pine, which only seed through fire, regenerate. The ferns and huckleberry will start growing again in the spring. The ridge should be a safer place to live now. Those houses that were not affected will clear around their homes, and much of the park is cleared of dead trees and brush, allowing new growth.
We sifted though the remains of our cabin and found a pair of metal candle sticks, still intact, which Richard’s grandfather brought from Russia in the early 1900’s. With a group of friends and volunteers, we shoveled ashes into garbage bags. Two trips to the dump, and the cabin became a memory. Soon there will be no sign it was ever there.

Having recently returned from Bali, maybe we have a different philosophical perspective. In Bali, we had witnessed and photographed many cremations. They seemed a natural part of life. In that culture, cremations are a public event, a celebration of the person’s life and a freeing of the soul.
As artists, Richard and I found the only way to deal with the situation, given that we are not trained firefighters, was to record it with our cameras and our writing. We made images of the fire to remember what happened, to analyze it later, to capture the beauty of this phoenix–like transformation from old to young forest. The great cycle of life rolls on and we should not hurry or retard this process, an essential to the life of the ecosystem we are a part of.
At the coast near Limantour Beach it is easy to forget the fire ever happened. The first spring brought spectacular luminous green growth. All the old dead vegetation had been removed by the fire. The seeds in the soil exploded with life as they did not have to compete with older growth. The wildflowers, grasses and shrubs returned more abundant than ever.

On Inverness Ridge the huckleberry bushes and ferns came back as expected and miniature forests of bishop pine appeared all over ridge. Invasive weeds like thistle took advantage of the cleared vegetation to make a strong stand but so too did the wildflowers, which were more visible than before. That first spring, lupine covered whole hillsides with blue sweetly smelling blossoms. Panoramic views to the ocean were revealed as thousands of dead trees lost their needles.
The fire burned so hot that few trees lived. On our land, three trees survived. However shoots have sprouted from some of the tree roots.
Many of the people who lost their homes have rebuilt. Neighbors have grown closer as they share their experiences and frustrations in the building process. We flew over the area in a small airplane. Before the fire on a similar flight we could not find our land because of the dense foliage, now it looked like a barren mountain top.

Surprisingly, there are more birds nesting in the burned land than in adjacent unburned areas. Researchers think that the reason is the reduced number of predators like snakes and woodrats as well as the vigorous growth of the new vegetation. Tule elk have been introduced north of Limantour Road, a section of the park that was burned in the fire and cleared of dense undergrowth. This could help solve the problem of overpopulation at Tomales Point where the 13 original elk reintroduced to the area in 1978 has grown to more than 500.
A mountain lion has been photographed on Mount Vision on a research camera set up by the Park Service to record animal life returning to the area. Also photographed was the rare Point Reyes mountain beaver, which people feared had not survived the conflagration.