The Rim Fire gained worldwide notoriety for burning into Yosemite National Park, the granite-walled wonderland sometimes ranked as California's top tourist attraction.
But early on, the rampant blaze that's now 30 days old descended into another High Sierra treasure, the Tuolumne River Canyon, where four whitewater rafting guides — including a former Occidental man — assisted firefighters in what became a hazardous effort to halt the fire.
Isaac Ingram, operations manager for the American River Touring Association (ARTA), said the episode began with an unusual request from the U.S. Forest Service's Groveland Ranger District the morning of Aug. 19.
"How long would it take you to get a crew down to Meral's Pool?" Ingram said, recalling the inquiry from the ranger station that manages public use of the Tuolumne River.
Meral's Pool is the put-in spot for the 18-mile voyage down the Tuolumne, a stretch that drops 40 feet per mile and is studded with roaring Class IV and V rapids, tops on the scale of difficulty.
"They wanted to get firefighters across the river to cut a fire line," said Ingram, 31, an El Molino High graduate in 2000 who joined ARTA as a professional guide two years later.
At the time "it didn't seem like a big deal," he said.
The fire, ignited by a hunter's illegal campfire, had started Aug. 17 on Jawbone Ridge, about two miles up the Clavey River from its confluence with the Tuolumne.
"We told them we could be there in an hour," Ingram said, calculating the 40 minutes it takes ARTA's flatbed truck to rumble down the rough, 5-mile Lumsden Road to Meral's Pool.
Ingram, ARTA general manager Steve Welch and two guides took a pair of 16-foot inflatable rafts down to the put-in. It turned out the firefighters wanted to cross below Sunderland's Chute, the third rapid downstream from Meral's Pool.
As the two guides negotiated the first rapid, called Rock Garden, a firefighting helicopter descended to take a load of water from the river.
Flames were creeping through the grass on the north side of the river, and the firefighters seemed at ease.
The guides were obliged to put on green pants and yellow long-sleeved shirts over their river shorts as they ferried 50 to 60 firefighters — five per boat at a time — across the cold, clear river, which flows out of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir inside Yosemite.
The transfer started around 10 a.m.
About four hours later, the firefighters came rushing back to the river, crossed by raft back to the south side, and told the guides to get out fast, leaving their rafts behind.
"We didn't slow down for any of the bumps on Lumsden Road," said Ingram, who earned a bachelor's degree in environmental science at Chico State in 2007.
The wind had shifted and the fire followed them up the canyon's south wall, ultimately arcing over Highway 120 and just missing ARTA's office at La Casa Loma Store and the ranger station about eight miles east of Groveland.
"It seemed pretty scary," Ingram said. "It looked like it was coming right toward us."
ARTA and the other businesses at Casa Loma evacuated to Groveland, and Highway 120, a major route into Yosemite, was closed at the store.
The Tuolumne boating season ended that day, but after the fire passed Welch returned to the river, found both rafts untouched by fire and rowed the rest of the way downstream.
The steep, stunning canyon, which burned in 1987, sustained major damage, burned to bare earth in places and barely touched in others, Welch reported.
Eric Wesselman, executive director of the Tuolumne River Trust, said there was extensive fire damage along a 40-mile wild and scenic stretch of the river from Hetch Hetchy to the Don Pedro Reservoir. If the winter brings heavy rains, erosion could damage Lumsden Road and the river.
The nonprofit group last week launched a Rim Fire Recovery Campaign hoping to raise $250,000 to start an effort that will cost millions of dollars.
"Mother Nature will come back," Wesselman said. "She's going to need our help."
(You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com.)
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