The intensely hot and fast-moving wildfires of the past four years have razed communities of all sorts in the West, including semi-urban neighborhoods next to freeways. But the forested and isolated
When wildfires race through the hills, roads shrouded in vegetation become tunnels of fire. Too often there is only one way out. Two years ago, more than 80 people were killed and 18,000 homes were destroyed in the foothills of the Sierra in and around the town of Paradise, an hour’s drive from Berry Creek.
Rick Crowder, who quit his job as a UPS truck driver and became a yodeling country singer who has performed at Carnegie Hall, has two homes on the edge of the Sierra, one of them in Paradise. Both properties have been scorched by wildfires but somehow not destroyed, as some of his neighbors’ homes were.
By the door of his Paradise home, Mr. Crowder, whose stage name is Sourdough Slim, keeps his most precious belongings ready to go — five guitars, four accordions, ukuleles and banjos, boxes of pleated wool and gabardine trousers, 10-gallon hats and cowboy boots.
“Everything I would need to perform,” he said.
Mr. Crowder grew up in the forests of the Sierra; his grandfather, who mined gold on the Honcut Creek, would put out wildfires with the help of a bulldozer.