SAVED AGAIN, TWO YEARS LATER
Santa Rosa rancher, others make a stand as wildfire nears 2017 Tubbs burn area
SANTA ROSA >> Two years ago, rancher Aaron Lucich single-handedly saved his organic, grass-fed herd of cattle from the horrendous Tubbs Fire that tore through the 3,000-acre Pepperwood Preserve in the hills above town.
Early Monday morning, on the same property, on the same ridge, he was back at it.
But this time, he had help from more than 100 firefighters, determined to stop the Kincade Fire from retracing the deadly, destructive path it took in 2017.
“If I left them where they were, the cattle would have barbecued last night,” said Lucich, a 56-year-old former San Francisco media producer whose midlife crisis led him to his current occupation as an only-in-California evangelist for holistic agriculture management.
He doesn’t own this pastureland at the epicenter of California’s fire fury, but is fighting to preserve this piece of property and pro
tect his herd.
Unlike the Tubbs Fire in 2017 that was so sudden it destroyed 12 miles of homes and forest in four hours — from the edge of Calistoga to the subdivisions of Santa Rosa — fire crews had days of advance warning for the arrival of this month’s Kincade Fire. They set up on the ridge above Pepperwood’s conservation institute and the beloved Safari West Wildlife Preserve just below.
“We were greatly concerned it would come over the ridge line,” Sonoma County Fire Chief Mark Heine said Monday. The last thing they wanted, he said, was for the fire to run through the canyons along Mark West Springs Road “and do the exact same thing over again.”
Like Lucich, Safari West owner Peter Lang, who saved every beating heart on his thousand-animal preserve in 2017 with a garden hose, pulled another all-nighter with the Kincade Fire. But this time, he was mostly monitoring and assessing, ready with a hose should the fire come. The same crews up above, that kept the fire away from Pepperwood, kept Safari West safe, too.
Monday morning, fire engines were parked outside the entrance gates, ready for another night of fighting if the fire changed direction. Gustier winds are expected to pick up today as well.
“Everyone is nervous,” Keo Hornbostel, Safari West’s executive director, said Monday in an interview that was interrupted by the screeching of red-ruffed lemurs nearby. “But at the same time, everyone is focused on, ‘How can I help?’ ”
But Hornbostel said Monday that the overnight effort was mostly keeping watch: The firefighters kept the red glow from descending the ridge.
Fire is not supposed to reignite on a burn scar — the blackened path of a previous fire. But two years of rain have turned the rolling California hills golden with grasses again and two years of construction have replaced scores of homes in the same canyons and subdivisions. A drive up Mark West Springs Road looks like a tour of model homes. Some of the foliage is still dense, turning autumn reds and golds.
On Sunday night and Monday morning, the Kincade Fire that had burned just east of Healdsburg and Windsor over the weekend, made a run into the fringes of the burn scar. That included the neighborhood of Larkfield-Wikiup, close to Highway 101, just north of Mark West Springs Road, where scores of homes were destroyed in 2017. Now, freshly painted new houses with trimmed green lawns stand next to wooden shells covered in scaffolding.
“The Tubbs Fire came up on one side of us, and this fire was on the other side,” said Leo Clamar, standing outside his house in the Larkfield-Wikiup neighborhood on Monday and looking up at the smoky ridge above. “We’re sandwiched in between. It seems to me that getting this every two years is the new norm — and we’ve already been lucky twice.”
At Pepperwood Preserve, where Lucich saved his cattle, the Kincade Fire burned some 30 acres overnight.
He doesn’t claim to have matched the dramatic rescue made by his Safari West neighbor in 2017. He has 200 cows, not 98 exotic species of animals, from rhinos and giraffes to flamingos and nyalas. And the cattle instinctively know to move away from the fire, he said.
Still, when he first learned the flames were heading toward the pasturelands on Saturday, he left what he called a “bougie farm-to-table fundraiser” in Petaluma to move the herd from the fire’s edge. He was still wearing his shorts and Paleo sandals while he whistled for the cattle to come down into the canyon and back up to another hillside closer to the institute’s modern cement headquarters. His iPhone health app showed he walked 6 miles and the equivalent of 127 flights of stairs that night.
“That first night was terrifying,” he said.
With the fire burning in the same places on the property in both 2017 and again this week, he said, “I seem to be this pivot point.”
Lucich kept his cattle trailer parked nearby — it holds up to 50 head — in case the fire burned out of control Monday. It would have taken an impossible four trips to save them all.
Still, he was ready late Sunday night when the gusty winds picked up over the Bald Hills and torched trees on the ridge, blowing embers and leaves across the property. He corralled the cattle into a safe pocket of land, where they remained Monday morning.
“When I went to bed, seven ’dozers were on the ridge,” he said. The fire made an initial jump, he said, but a second line of firefighters kept it from descending. “They rocked it last night.”
It burned his winter pasture, however, and Lucich will have to find somewhere else for his cattle to graze. And the danger isn’t over.
There’s no power at the Pepperwood Preserve. But he has an air mattress, and for as long as the Kincade Fire poses a threat, he plans to sleep there.