The 2013 Mountain Fire — how a wildfire roared up this range in a July week, drove Idyllwild's whole town down the mountain, and why the scarred slopes you pass are healing still.
As you come down this side of the mountain, you'll pass through country that carries a scar, and a memory, from not so many years ago — because in the summer of 2013, this whole beautiful range came within a hard-fought inch of burning down, and the little town of Idyllwild had to run for its life. Let me tell you about it.
It was the middle of July, 2013 — high summer, the worst possible time, the mountain bone-dry after months without rain, the brush and timber just waiting for a spark. And a fire started, down near the junction country you drove through back at Mountain Center. In that heat and that dryness, it did not stay small. It stood up and it ran — up the ridges, through the chaparral and into the pines, throwing up a column of smoke you could see for a hundred miles, out across the desert and clear to the coast.
And it came for the towns. Idyllwild, and its neighbor Pine Cove, all these mountain communities tucked in the trees — the order went out, and thousands of people had to pack what they could grab and drive down these very mountain roads, out of the smoke, not knowing if their homes would be standing when they came back. Imagine it: the whole town streaming down the grade, the sky orange, the fire crews streaming up the other way to meet it.
Now here's the part worth remembering. Those crews — the hotshots, the engine companies, the air tankers dropping retardant on these ridges, hundreds and hundreds of firefighters — they made a stand for this town, and they held it. The fire burned some twenty-seven thousand acres of this mountain, a huge and terrible scar. But through skill and sweat and a couple of lucky turns of the wind, they kept it out of the heart of Idyllwild. The town was spared. The people came home.
You can still read the fire on the land as you drive — patches where the trees stand black and bare, and all around them the green fighting its way back, the brush and the wildflowers and the young growth returning, because that's what these mountains do; fire is an old part of their life, even when it's a hard one. So as you roll down through here, you're driving through a story of loss and of rescue both — a mountain that burned, a town that ran and was saved, and a forest slowly healing itself. Give a quiet thanks to the folks who fought for this place. Almost down now.
Photo: Lisa Cox, USFS · Public domain
