- [Liz] To be honest,
I'm not a huge hiker. That's what was kind of funny to find me
at Eagle Creek. I just brought my car key, and left water and phone and everything in
the car, and I was kind of celebrating that feeling of just being really light
and unencumbered. I came to this part of the trail where I came upon a big group
of people. And then there's this big view of the valley, and you can see the steep
sides all forested. I remember there were these girls to my left,
and then I remember these two boys to my right, one was really tall and one
was pretty short. And I saw the shorter one just lob something that was on fire,
and it was just sort of this casual overhand lob, as we all just kind of
leaned over and watched this thing just fall deep, I couldn't see where it
landed. I think what I said was, "Do you realize how dangerous that is?"
There was just sort of this reaction from the girls behind me of like, "Hehe."
And then they continued down the trail. And I remember just thinking, "Wow,
that's crazy." But then I kept walking, and so I continued up another five minutes
or less, literally a voice in my head said, "Liz, you would feel so stupid
if that turned into a massive fire and you saw it happen, and you got stuck."
And I just turned around and started hauling down the mountain.
Very quickly I came upon the spot, and what had been a trail of smoke was now
20 to 30-feet wide of bellowing smoke. And so I just started running down the
trail, and I was very scared, and I'm on this really narrow trail,
and now I'm having to run down it. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Peter] That's the thing about that
weekend, the five of us hadn't been together in months and months and months.
I mean we had a variety of things planned, but one of them was this short afternoon
hike on a beautiful, hot summer afternoon. ♪ [music] ♪ - [Noah] One day I was just sitting at
home, and it's almost the end of summer, and we had a group message going at the
time, and so I texted that, I said, "Hey, does anybody want to get together and
go on this cool hike up in the gorge? A day hike, nothing too major?"
And so we got like 10 of us together. - [Madison] It was on her birthday.
- [Maya] It was just like a last minute hike, and I was like, "Oh,
I'll just go with my friends." - This wasn't like before
her birthday, but it was on. It was actually on her birthday though. - [Jaylynn] I remember my dad not wanting
me to go. So I just told him that we were going to Noah's house. - And we kind of had this idea, "Oh, well
we don't really want to be on our phones the whole time, we have cameras anyways
to take pictures, so let's just leave our phones in the car." We were like,
"Oh, it's only a two-mile hike, so I'll leave this huge water jug in the
car too." And we just packed up our backpacks and started hiking. ♪ [music] ♪ - Got a little swimming,
and then sort of you know laced up our boots and then started hiking down.
And our son, Teddy, was ahead of us with the dog Ralph, and suddenly he came
sprinting back at about the one-mile mark. He said, you know, "The hill is on fire.
the trail's unpassable. We got to go back." And I was, you know, being the dad,
I was in control. I said, "No, no, I'll go take a look." I thought like, "Oh,
you know, we can probably jump it." And Teddy just grabbed me and said,
"No, you're turning around." And he was like freaked out,
and so I thought, "Oh, okay. I can respect that kind of fear." - You could hear it long before you got
actually to in. You can just hear this crumbling and this rumbling.
And when we turned in this corner, and we're just hit with a wall of heat. - And so we were all with this huge,
mismatched group of people, about 140 of us hanging around and
like, waiting for something to happen because it was clear that there was this
fire down there, but we also knew that there was the fire above us in
Indian Creek. And from the look of it, we were trapped on both ends. ♪ [music] ♪ - Finally, I got to the bottom where it's
like you come down the trail and you can see, "Oh, there is the water,
it's only like a 10, 13-foot drop, I'm safe," and I just started hauling
through the parking lot, and very quickly came to this massive SUV
of Forest Service. And he immediately went on the radio and called in that there was
a fire. And then he got out of the truck and he's like,
"Okay, so tell me your story." Maybe 5 or 10 minutes had gone by,
and I was feeling uncomfortable because I knew those kids could have gotten
into the cars and just driven off, and I really wanted the kids to be held
accountable for what happened because I could see that they really had
no connection with their actions and what was happening. And this minivan went by,
and I watched the girl in the front seat of the car, and I did not recognize her
face, but there was just something about the whole vibe that I was like,
"I think that's them." And he said, "Are you comfortable getting in the
car with me?" And I said, "Yes." And we're now sirens chasing this minivan
who then takes off. And I remember like just thinking, "I feel like I'm in
a movie," like this is crazy. The state police came and
they were interviewing the kids. They just looked like they were hanging
out at, like, the shopping mall, just completely chilling.
We're watching all of this happening, and there's this massive disconnect.
And I also felt you know this tremendous weight of like, "These kids are busted for
this massive thing," and that felt very heavy to me too, because I knew what
a big deal this was, whether they knew it or not. - [Female anchor] We are
tracking breaking news tonight, a wildfire burning in the Columbia River
Gorge, 140 hikers are essentially trapped and will have to spend the night
hoping for the best. - [Male anchor] What a sight this is
behind us in the hours we've been out here covering this fire, it is no doubt
growing. Take a look, a true hell on earth,
almost apocalyptic looking, embers are still flying,
heavy ash raining down for miles. And as you can see right there,
entire cliff sides engulfed in flames. - [Michael] It had been a really hot, dry
summer, there had been a lot of fuel building up because of a very wet spring,
and then it was a day after day of temperatures in the 90s,
all it takes is one spark to ignite the forest. - [Jessica] This map is the fire
progression on the Eagle Creek fire. Fire started here on Eagle Creek,
and it went over this ridge overnight, and down towards Cascade Locks.
Day 2 was this darker purple. And then Day 3 is this
whiter purple here. - The fire was difficult to put out
for a couple of reasons. One, it was on very steep terrain,
much of it burned within a wilderness area where there are no roads.
And then also the policy is within the backcountry and wild areas. Again,
fire is a part of forest ecology, where they concentrated their efforts
is around population centers. - [Shelly] Cascade Locks is a teeny-tiny,
little fishing town that used to be a lumber town, but now our business
and our livelihoods rely on tourism, obviously the hiking,
the trails and things like that. Columbia River Gorge is just a
beautiful, scenic area, full of mountains, full of wildlife. People come here to
hike, to bike, to camp, to site-see. And I think most people that come here
wind up staying. The night of the fire, I walked outside to the backyard of the
restaurant here, and I looked up and I saw this big, gigantic smoke plume
and I thought, "Ooh, crap." I watched it for a few minutes,
and I came inside, and I told all of my employees, I said, "Here is the deal,
I think there's a fire, let's get ready." - [Matt] We were told that they were
recommending a Level 3 Evacuation. And what Level 3 means is
"Get out now." So there's three levels of fire evacuation, there's Level 1
which is get ready, Level 2, get set, Level 3, go. And we were at go before
we even had a chance to do 1 or 2. That's how quickly this was evolving. - If the devil had fingers that extended,
that's what it looked like. It literally looked like fingers just
running…like fire fingers running down the mountain, and at one point,
it was traveling so fast we just watched it just crawl right down the mountain in
several different spots. So at that point, just about everybody went home except
for me. And I called my husband, and I said, "Here's the deal, I'm going to
stay. I've got my truck parked in a handicapped spot out there. If this thing
is going to go up, I'm going to watch it." To me, this place is really everything.
I put six years of [inaudible], six years of blood, sweat, and tears
into it. So it's my home, this is my everything. Sorry. - The way the fire was coming,
and smoke that had once been a yellow curtain was now like a vast,
sort of boiling, black and reddish, and angry-looking wall of, you know,
smoke. And it was getting closer. ♪ [music] ♪ At one point, helicopters from the
Indian Creek fire started fluttering down and dumping water.
A smaller helicopter came and flooded over us, and it took off and then came
back and dropped a note, and it said, "We see you. Stay put.
Extreme danger," or something. - We're in this huge group of
random strangers and people, and we all kind of started talking, and,
"Are we going to have to hike out of this? Are we going to have to spend the night
here? How are we going to get enough food? How are we going to get enough water?"
Nobody really had any answers. - If Rob hadn't been there,
I hate to even think about that. Rob happened to sit next to us
on the beach of Punch Bowl Falls, and eventually it came out that he'd been
a technical sergeant in the Air Force, and had come back recently from
a couple of tours in Afghanistan. And so when I heard that,
just joking around I said, "Well, Jesus, you should be telling us what
to do here. Take control, you know. It's a battle." And he laughed.
I mean, it was intended just as a joke. But then later he told me,
"I knew you were joking," but that actually was, like, sort of, a catalytic
moment. And so, Robbie got up on the rock and introduced himself, and explained what
was going on and where things stood, and said, "I think it's time for us to go,
and we're all going to make it out alive. And the way we're going to do that
is we're sticking together." - When we got to the top of the trail to
start hiking out, there's people numbering off, people with like pen and
paper. So I said, "Okay, 129, what's up?" - We had established some phone
contact with some people in the group and pretty
shortly into the hike out of the drainage towards the
intended destination for the evening we lost communication There were only two ways out one of them we know was blocked by fire and that was the new Eagle Creek Fire the second was going up the
Eagle Creek Trail past the point where it had been closed as a
result of the Indian Creek Fire that was heading eastward rapidly our only hope was that it hadn't
crossed the trail yet - We had really good communication,
like if somebody needed like a med kit or like a map or something,
one person would say it, and the person behind him would say it,
and so you'll just hear, "Map." "Map." "Map." "Map." "Map." "Map."
"Map." "Map," all the way down in the line of people until somebody had it,
and then they would just pass it along the line of people up to the front. - I think it was a lot of making jokes,
and singing songs, and just pushing each other to keep going. - We kind of thought of it
as like a group sleepover. - Yeah. Or like we were all on "Survivor." ♪ [music] ♪ - [Female 1] Be careful. - [Male 1] We're hiking
out of [inaudible]. - Those hippies were right behind us with
their guitars and their sandals and their didgeridoo. The women from O.S.U.
showed up in…they were wearing bikinis and like, running shoes.
Like, I don't think they even had a shirt, or, you know, maybe they had towels
or something, but they were extraordinarily unprepared. - I left everything in the car.
I left my bag, my towel, my water bottle because I was just
thinking of swimming, it was really hot. - When we got up by the hem of the fire,
we sat down, and the sky was red above us, and enflaming embers were raining down
around us and starting spot fires on the riverbank. And one really started
going, and one of the hippies, bless his beaded soul, hopped across the river,
and with like a thing on water and put it out. And then did this thing of like
digging into the dirt where the fire was and making sure there were no embers.
Because as it turns out, this guy had a summer job with the Forest Service
fighting fires. So guess what, you know, he knew exactly what to do. - I think that was the scariest part
because we felt like it could spread and come towards us, and we didn't
really have anywhere to go. - I remember at that point that's when the
mood kind of changed. People realized, "Oh, crap, this is huge, we don't
have food, we don't have water." People were worried. - I think we left Punch Bowl Falls at
about 6:00, so we had like a couple hours of light, and then it began to get dark.
And so we were kind of hiking by flashlight at that point.
This was just before we got to Tunnel Falls, the highest and most
dangerous of all the sections of the trail that go just right on the face of the
cliff. The part of the trail goes behind the waterfall,
and so it's constantly wet and slippery. - We were just hiking on this narrow trail
with the cable right here, you're holding on to that. And just
this tight cut off and just blackness below you. And there's a waterfall in
front of us, and so you just see that falling into an abyss. - Everybody had those phones
and walking into the smoky canyon. It was like this procession into a
cathedral, because this light was so glowing and so…just these little balls of
light coming up, you know, and this long train of people one after the other,
after the other, after the other. - You can hardly see the people,
but you can see there are dots of light going all the way out this little canyon,
and the whole time you could hear they were just going like, "Wong,
wong, wong, wong, wong." Like, "What?" That was an
insane feeling. It's surreal. - And it was like it was weird,
sort of, haunting moment of beauty, right there, you know, on the edge of
the cliff. You know, we finally pushed past it, and we walked just a little
farther, like maybe a mile or so, and everybody just found a place to…a
little patch of ground to lie down and… - We just, like, cuddled and tried to
stay as warm as possible. - We didn't really sleep at all though. - I think that all...it hit us at the same
moment of like realizing that we were going to spend the night,
and they weren't going to give us a phone to like contact our parents. - You know so we just had to lie down in a
lump and try to kind of preserve whatever warmth that we could.
And you know, but lying in the dirt without a pad or anything underneath you,
you suddenly become acquainted with how many rocks there can be. ♪ [music] ♪ - The first night, I spent the night in my
truck. By morning, I realized that it might actually be not savable. So I went
home, I took a shower, sat on my couch, and my cell phone rang
and it was Kim Brigham. I answered the phone, and she said,
"What you doing?" And I said, "Well, clearly I'm not opening the restaurant
today, Kim. Like, what do you think I'm doing? I'm sitting on my couch,
feeling sorry for myself." She's like, "Well, we have a lot of hungry
firefighters in town." She's like, "So, I'm going to go and make some chowder
and serve it up." She's like, "So, I'm going to ask you one more time,
what are you doing today, Shelly?" I said, "Well, clearly Kim, I'm coming out to make
pizzas for hungry firefighters, right? Because that's what we do." And she's
like, "Okay, I'll see you in a bit." We were going to take ice up to
make sure they had cold water. Drove up to the fire station,
and I pulled into a parking spot that was open and I saw something move,
I realized that it was somebody sleeping. So I turned off my lights,
and I looked and I scanned, and there was dozens of them just like
sleeping on the fire station lawn because they didn't have anywhere to sleep,
and I just started crying, and I was like, "This is crazy. We've got to do something
to help these guys, anything to help these guys." People that weren't evacuated
or even weren't heard that our vehicles were outside, showed up at the back door
and knocked on the door, and said, "What can we do to help? What do you need,
anything?" I think everybody's feeling was kind of the same as mine, just like,
"This is it. We're going to have nothing to come home to." It looked like
we were going to be annihilated, it looked like the fire was going to take
us over, it looked like it was being swallowed by the pits of hell. - The second day, we woke up and
everything looked like there was this heavy fog. And so we breathed in,
realize there's all this heavy smoke. - And so we just walked and walked and
walked, and it was kind of hard to figure out how much farther there was to go,
because every time we bumped into another forest person we'd say,
"How much farther?", they would give us like wildly different answers.
And eventually you get to this Wahtum Lake, and you walk up this huge
case of stairs, and it's called the Stairway to Heaven,
which is like a little too cute. - [Female anchor] It was an
emotional reunion. - Oh my gosh, it's such
a relief. I mean, like, everyone's prayer has been answered. - He spent the night in the forest with
more than 150 others pouring out of shuttle buses after
getting trapped on the trail. - It was long and tiresome.
And we were running out of water and food, so we kind of just helped each other.
If somebody didn't have water, we'd provide it for them, or if somebody
don't have food, we'd help out. ♪ [music] ♪ - One of the things I did when I got back,
you know I have these hiking shoes, and they were so filthy and covered with
ash, and so I hosed them down really good, and I put them on the back steps to dry
overnight. And when I came back down, you know I just saw them the next morning,
they were covered in ash again because the smoke and everything from
the fire was moving west, sort of moving toward us. And so it was kind of like,
"That fire is still after us," you know. It's like, you couldn't get away from it. - [Woman] Oregon is burning,
all of Oregon is burning. It's all burning. - [Male anchor] Flames tearing
through the trees, thick smoke blanketing the gorge, these are the surreal images
of the Eagle Creek fire tonight. That blaze inches towards
a town evacuating. - The families who rushed out in the
middle of the night can only watch with faces as grim as the sky,
waiting for a glimpse of hope. - At the peak of the fire, there were over
1,000 firefighters making sure that brush was clear, that were back burning areas,
that were monitoring fire activities. - Cascade Locks is right here,
that's kind of patch of white. And there's a black line right here
that indicates the fire line, and the back burn that was created
around Cascade Locks to protect it. And it came down all the way to
Bridal Veil, so roughly 22 to 24 miles of burn. - You know what ultimately stopped
this fire was Mother Nature. It was kind of luck with weather,
and we got some pretty major rain that came in and really stopped
this fire in its tracks. - It's a little bit of a misunderstanding
the the fire was was 49,000 acres That just describes the perimeter, it
really burned in a mosaic pattern so within that 49,00 acres, more than half
of it, 55 percent of it is intact forest today. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, its
you know think of Yellowstone National Park, think of
Yosemite National Park Mount Rushmore, its on the level of
those national treasures that we've worked so hard for over
100 years to protect Things that make the Columbia River
National Scenic Area stand apart is the long history of human
habitation here with Native American tribes going
back more than 10 thousand years - [Ken] This river was called
[Native American language]. we are the salmon people. [Native American language],
means the salmon people. There were more salmon here than any river
on the North American continent. - [Terrie] My parents did it,
and so that's just what we do. We go out on the boat, it was
my dad, myself... Shelly and I, when I could, we were feeding the
firefighters, and I was still trying to fish. But the fishing was just kind of…
It was during the peak of the season, and they kind of stopped.
There was ash falling on the river and debris. I cannot praise those
firefighters enough. We were lucky, it was a quarter mile from town,
and there were no lives lost, no houses lost for Cascade Locks. - This was the closest town that it came
to, really. I mean, this was the town that was evacuated first.
So people in this town were really angry. - [Male anchor] Investigators do
say they know who started the fire. They claim it's a 15-year-old boy who was
lighting fireworks on the Eagle Creek Trail. And tonight, we talk with a woman
who witnessed what she says the boy did. - If I'm not mistaken, the headline said,
"Teens giggled as they lobbed the firecracker." And it's like,
"Well, I never said they giggled." The way that it was written about was
like, "Well wait, you're painting a picture like these kids were like
malicious, they were just clueless." There's a big difference.
Then it no longer became my story, and what I started seeing was that it
became this incredible monster. - [Male anchor] Just thinking about
the teenager who was accused of starting the fire with a firework
is enough to make tempers flare. - Oh, are you kidding me?
There are so many head hunters out. - [Female anchor] There was concern
for the safety of the teen and his family because of threats made against him
on social media. They include comments such as, "Fry them up, throw them
in the fire," and other things we can't say on TV. - You know I had local media knocking on
my door to film me, and I was like, "No." They didn't care that they were
totally getting the city bonkers. The city went bonkers, we all did.
They were feeding like this anger that we were all feeling, like I had felt angry,
I ran down the trail. But then I saw like, "Oh, wait, you guys want to kill these
kids? Like literally you think they should pay for the rest of their lives?
You think their families should be bankrupt? What?" It's like who hasn't
done stupid stuff? I do stupid stuff every day. And who hasn't been really dumb
when they were 16? Every 16-year-old. - [Jennifer] Thirty six point six million
dollars, that's the amount a judge in Hood River County determine that a 15-year-old
who started the Eagle Creek fire will have to pay. - It weighs on me, you know, what's
happened to these kids. This one kid, you know, like the fine that's been
imposed, like how can anyone pay something like that? I could not have responded
any differently than I did, this is just my personality.
I couldn't have done it, I was compelled to do all the things
I did. But it doesn't come without a great weight, you know that it's like
this kid, his life is now forever altered not just because of the action
that he took but because of my action too, and that's a huge weight. ♪ [music] ♪ - We can't really judge anybody in our way
and blame anybody, it just must have been the way of the Creator
to allow it to happen. - Fires are a natural part of forest
ecosystem. Fires and forest have been together for hundreds of millions
of years really. - We burned all the forests in the valleys
from time-to-time. These fires were usually put there so that there
would be new huckleberry bushes, and they come in fast. - Forest have become very resilient to
fires or certain species that would not exist, but for fires, there are some
species, for example, pine trees whose seeds won't even open up
unless they're exposed to a fire. - It really only dawned on me later of how
close we came to having our whole family just wiped off the planet.
It brings up all these kind of scary extensional feelings when you realize
exactly how casual things were right up until that moment. But that's
how it is, I mean, you never know, one minute everything is great,
the next minute, you know, you're on the edge of existence. - With the sense of community spirit
here, I think I realized for the very first time during the fire, it made me
proud to be here, it made me proud to be a member of this city, of this town,
of Cascade Locks. - Just a few weeks later, we went to
Hawaii because my nephew is getting married out there. Music was playing in
and people were dancing, and at one point, they put on Jimmy
Buffett's cover of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl." So the five of us,
we're just in this closed circle dancing like maniacs to this shitty cover of a
worn out song. It was like a transcendent moment, it's like we had ascended to
this very safe, not the least bit on fire. And it was like, "Yeah, we did that.
We got through that," and here we are just, you know, carelessly,
cheerfully dancing together. ♪ [music] ♪
