SEATTLE — As the Pioneer Fire crept within a mile and a half of the remote northern town of Stehekin, Washington, emergency management officials on Sunday raced door to door asking residents to leave.
The evacuation warning had been raised to its highest level.
“Boats are running,” said Rich Magnussen, an emergency management specialist with Chelan County. “They’re running twice a day to try to get people out that choose to leave.”
There haven’t been many takers. Most residents have remained in their homes, choosing to bolster their defenses and provide support to firefighters, rather than flee.
“We’ll do everything we can to get people out, but due to fire conditions, we can’t guarantee,” Magnussen added.
Stehekin is a tight-knit community on the bank of Lake Chelan, a deep, 50-mile lake that curls through the North Cascade mountains — among the most rugged landscapes in the U.S. No roads connect Stehekin to the rest of the state. The only quick exit is by helicopter or boat.
“We really need those folks to come downriver and get out of harm’s way,” Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a video address on X, imploring residents to evacuate.
But by Wednesday afternoon, three days later, 90 of the 95 area residents had decided to stay put, according to Magnussen, who said Washington residents have the legal right to stay and defend their homes during a wildfire.
Chelsea Courtney, a Stehekin resident and artist who works at the local pastry bakery, chose to stay.
“There are a lot of really independent people here used to being extremely resourceful, relying on their neighbors,” Courtney said. “People care passionately about this valley and the life they’ve made here and I don’t think we quite trust entities completely with the management choices that have happened.”
Courtney said Stehekin residents appreciate firefighters’ efforts, but also question why the fire could not have been attacked more aggressively when it started in June. She added that there have been occasional communication breakdowns between fire managers and residents, and she doesn’t understand why more couldn’t have been done in colder months to manage the forest to better adapt to the changing climate.
Mistaya Johnston, a local paramedic and ranch resort owner, added: “There’s a lot of people up here that just don’t have confidence” and in such a self-reliant community, many people want to see it through themselves when the stakes are so high.
“If our business burns, we don’t get a paycheck anymore,” Johnston said.
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Sentiments like these are common during high-stress wildfires throughout the rural West. As large, intense wildfires and evacuations become more common, some residents are growing tired of uprooting their lives and are growing inured to the risk — or more confident in their own abilities to manage it themselves.
That means some people are determined to stay in their homes even when authorities say they ought to leave, particularly when there are rifts in trust between communities and those managing wildfires and emergency response.
“Especially in rural communities, we’ve started seeing a lot more folks decide to stay and defend,” said Amanda Stasiewicz, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Oregon who studies evacuation decisions. “There’s a lot of mistrust going on there.”
As fire behavior grows intense because of climate change and overgrown forests, doubts can fester in rural communities as fire managers operate more conservatively than in the past.
“People were used to seeing fires attacked in different ways decades ago and now there’s a different reality,” Stasiewicz said. “Now, we’re seeing fires act more radically, make their own weather and be more unpredictable.”
This dynamic is playing out in rural communities elsewhere.
Some Northern California residents whose homes are threatened by the Park Fire — now more than 397,000 acres and the fourth-largest in state history as of Friday morning — have similarly decided not to evacuate, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. One couple told the Chronicle that they’d soured on evacuating after they had to wait 10 days to return home after the 2018 Camp Fire.
Some 94 large fires are burning across the West, which more than 29,000 wildland firefighters are working to suppress, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Of those blazes, 28 have active evacuation orders.
“When it gets like this, it’s all hands on deck, and they’re running out of resources,” said Brad Bramlett, a public information officer assigned to the Pioneer Fire.
The Pacific Northwest, in particular, is reeling this summer as some 51 major fires burn in Oregon, Washington and Idaho. A hotter and drier-than-normal spring and summer primed the landscape to burn.
As of Friday morning, the Stehekin area was under a red flag warning for dangerous fire weather, according to the National Weather Service. The Pioneer fire had grown to more than 33,700 acres and was about 12% contained.
In most years, the fire season would only have just begun.
Stehekin’s full-time population is about 85, and its residents take small-town living to the extreme. The community famously resisted telephone service into the early 2000s.
Surrounded by glaciated peaks and the clear waters of Lake Chelan, the town swells in population during the summer, as tourists take 2.5-hour ferry rides to access trailheads in North Cascades National Park that begin in Stehekin.
The Pioneer Fire began on June 8 and has been slowly creeping north. It’s burning in some of the most challenging terrain firefighters must deal with in the U.S., with steep slopes, rocky outcrops and few trails.
“As soon as I heard about it, it was, ‘OK, here we go,’” Courtney said. “We all know how dry and early spring has been. It felt like the fire season was going to be accelerated.”
Stehekin residents have been planning and preparing, Courtney said, removing brush near homes, constructing a floating dock in the harbor and holding community meetings.
Tourists were forced away on July 25, when emergency officials raised the evacuation level to 2 of 3.
Meanwhile, firefighters have flooded into Stehekin. More than 640 fire personnel are working the fire, though not all are based in the town. Johnston said she and her staff of six have served about 200 meals a day to crews.
On Sunday, emergency officials asked everyone in the town to leave.
Magnussen said emergency management officials can’t guarantee any kind of help, particularly if the boat dock — “the only way out,” as he described it — burns.
“When they choose to stay, they’re doing so at their own risk,” he said.
Courtney said she recognizes that but worries that leaving Stehekin now could mean she won’t be able to return for weeks, if not longer. She feels her self-reliant community, which is filled with people who have boats and are used to working the land, is prepared to fend off fire, for now.
Some previous close calls have also hardened her demeanor toward fire. Courtney witnessed the 2015 Wolverine Fire, which burned more than 60,000 acres near Stehekin, and last month, she joined family and friends a few miles “down lake” to save her uncle’s property after firefighters had left.
“My tolerance has gone up,” she said.
Stasiewicz said that based on her own focus groups, surveys and interviews, sentiments like Courtney’s are becoming more common in rural communities. Evacuation often carries a stiff financial cost, she said, and some rural residents worry their properties won’t be prioritized.
“We can sometimes see rural communities lose compared to more developed areas. There is this mentality, ‘Maybe we do have to take care of ourselves,’” Stasiewicz said.
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Plus, she added, longer fire seasons with more frequent burns are wearing people down.
“If I’m told to evacuate every summer and they’re all misses, there is this ‘cry wolf effect,’” Stasiewicz said. “You lose your trust in experts saying you need to evacuate.”
For authorities, these trends mean it’s growing harder to convince people to leave. At the same time, fire managers are dealing with more dramatic fire behavior, which can lead them to make more conservative decisions — including issuing more frequent and widespread evacuation warnings.
In Stehekin, residents and firefighting crews have cut containment lines along the town’s eastern edge and set up sprinkler systems fed by the lake.
Planes and helicopters have been scooping up water from Lake Chelan and dumping it onto the fire.
Courtney said incident management crews have been rotating in shifts; the most recent group had been more communicative and proactive. She’s been helping feed firefighters each day at the Stehekin Pastry Co..
Courtney said what’s ahead for Stehekin will come down to the fire’s intensity, how well the containment line holds and whether the wind pushes the fire into town.
And what happens if the fire does arrive in town?
“I have access to a boat,” she said.
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