A Desperate Bid for Survival as Fire Closed In on an Oregon Mountain Town

The communities were once logging towns with three sawmills, where longtime residents said it was common to see locals walk into the post office or country store slinging a chain saw on their backs. But the decline of the timber industry turned Detroit and Idanha into tourist towns and bedroom communities for the state capital, Salem, about an hour’s drive down the hill.

Life there was full of mountain-town contradictions: Expansive second homes, squat cottages and people in trailers on the edge of poverty. Neighbors who put their pickups into park to chat when they drove past each other and recluses who shunned society.

Residents cherished the mountains and lake as an Edenic mini-Yellowstone, but there also was the time a few years back when Idanha considered dissolving itself; nobody wanted to run for office and a previous mayor had been charged with meth possession.

Summers brought a blur of boaters, bikers and vacation rentals. In the fall, Detroit Lake was drained and the 400 or so full-time residents spent winters embracing the quiet and trying to hang on economically even when weeks of blizzards buried them in 12 feet of snow.

As far as firefighters were concerned, the autumn rains and snow could not arrive too soon this year. Smoke and small fires were billowing through the summer, and the Douglas firs that mark Oregon’s license plates had become a carpet of tinder, ready to light the Willamette National Forest ablaze. Making it worse was the climate change that had intensified the drought and heat raking the West.

On Sept. 6, the day before their world exploded, the volunteers at the Idanha-Detroit Rural Fire Protection District were worried. The Beachie Creek Fire had been smoldering for a couple of weeks about 10 miles away in remote terrain so treacherous that crews had not been able to fully subdue the blaze. They met to discuss their wildfire attack plans.

When winds started to pick up the next night, some went out to do patrols to look for spot fires and downed trees. The power at the station blinked out.