A year after the Glass fire, rebuilding along Los Alamos Road is going slowly

Long night on the mountain

When Franchetti finally left his property, around 10:30 p.m. last Sept. 27, two of his neighbors’ homes were engulfed in flames. “I drove out with fire on both sides of the road,” recalled the 73-year-old.

Rolling down his driveway, towing a trailer occupied by Levi, a 12-year-old quarter horse Franchetti guessed “was the last critter off the mountain that night,” he was happy to see a strike team from the Cloverdale Fire Department approaching his house. He stopped and spoke with the crew’s captain, Kagen Davis.

He gave Davis a quick rundown, letting him know there was an extra water tank behind the house, and beyond that a 5-acre field his horses had grazed down to the dirt. If the crew needed it, said Franchetti, that field would serve as a safe place to ride out the fire.

They needed it.

As they “prepped” Franchetti’s house, pulling screens from windows, getting plastic and wood furniture off the deck, they noticed, with gratitude, that he’d cleared plenty of defensible space. The trees on the property had no branches within 15 feet of the ground, with no limbs hanging over the house.

Based on the prep work Franchetti had put in, and the availability of that safe zone, Davis made the decision to stay with the house through the night, even as the firestorm raged around him and his three-volunteer crew. One of them was an ex-Cal Fire employee with decades of firefighting experience. The other two were 18-year-olds, who performed very well, said Davis. “But it was basically their first fire.”

In making the decision to spend the night on the mountain, Davis was highly confident he and his crew could find refuge, if needed, in that 5-acre safe area. Davis was also all but certain “we could do a lot of good here. Even if we lost the garage, we could at least save the house.”

In fact, Kagen Davis and his Cloverdale crew saved all of Franchetti’s buildings. Which is why, a few weeks later, Jim and Cathy drove to the Cloverdale Fire Department with several hundred dollars worth of See’s Candies.

“Those fellows,” says Jim, “they just did a spectacular job.”

Spirit of Cougar Lane

A mile or so below, residents on Cougar Lane were getting bad news. Two and a half miles long, the road is 10 feet wide. Unwilling to risk blocking evacuees, firefighters did not venture down that ribbon of asphalt. Fifteen of the 17 houses on Cougar Lane burned to the ground.

Debby Eppstein and Mel didn’t need to evacuate: They were in Utah, visiting her sister, when the Glass fire raced down the Santa Rosa Creek drainage, which crosses their property. They watched the conflagration on their home’s security camera. The last images it recorded were of a fox, looking into the lens as giant embers wafted past.

The fox was gone on a recent Sunday morning, replaced by a coyote howling into the shipping container that sits where their living room once did.

Actually, it was the plastic skeleton of coyote, an early Halloween item purchased that morning at Friedman’s, along with $1,000 worth of tools and plants.

Their first view of the desolation came last October, on Debby’s birthday. So apocalyptic was the tableau awaiting them that they decided to bug out. “We said there’s no way we’re ever going to live here again,” she recalled.

As months went by, their thinking slowly changed. They were inspired by the pluck of neighbors determined to get back: Eppstein refers to it as “the spirit of Cougar Lane.”

Residents have needed large stores of that spirit to persist. Around 10 Cougar Lane homeowners — those living beyond the bridge over the Santa Rosa Creek — had spent many thousands of dollars putting in power poles and electric lines, with the expectation that PG&E would take them over.

Before that could happen, the fire swept through. Those residents still have no electricity, a year after the blaze.

As winter gave way to spring, new life emerged. In places, the burned landscape turned green. Eppstein points to redwoods around the foundation that have sprouted seedlings. On the sheer wall of the valley facing what was once their backdoor, vibrant green Bay laurel trees have claimed space amid the dead Doug firs.

They decided they would come back. Sort of.

While they now live in The Sea Ranch, they plan to put a tiny home on the Cougar Lane lot — along with the shipping container into which Mel has cut rectangles for a pair of sliding glass doors. Eppstein, meanwhile, is performing some serious horticultural artistry, transforming the concrete tiers of their foundation into an array of decks and giant planters.

“There will also be vegetable gardens,” she said, “and I’ll have flowers and shrubs going up the hillside.”

With so many of the surrounding trees now gone, they feel a bit exposed, in this new, barer landscape. But that missing cover has an upside. In the dead of winter, the sun doesn’t rise over the ridge until 11 a.m., then drops behind the tree line around 3 p.m.

“I always said, ‘If those trees weren’t there, I’d get more sun.’

“Well, I’m going to get more sun,” she said.

‘What do you want me to save?’

The scene on Los Alamos was quiet on a recent weekday, almost eerily so. The notable exception was the 45-acre Worden compound, directly across from the vast rock formation known as Eagle Rock. The outcropping so arresting that it appears in the literature of Jack London and was chosen as the background for a Ford Explorer print ad campaign two decades ago.

“It was shot right here,” said Eric Worden, motioning to the parking area outside the large, metal workshop that survived the fire. “It was in National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.”

Worden, who owns Redwood Empire Concrete Pumping Equipment, raised his voice to be heard over the cacophony created by a drill rig that was costing him $4,000 a day, boring dozens of holes for the concrete piers for the foundation of the house that will replace, but not duplicate, the building his grandfather, Al Nicholson, designed after buying this land in the 1930s. The family lost four other, smaller houses in the inferno.

They did not, however, lose Diesel, the ornery, independent, short-tailed cat who refused to get in the car, as usual, when it was time to evacuate.

They found him two days later, under a pickup that somehow also survived.

“Every inch of this place was burned black, but there was Diesel,” Worden recalled, “sitting up on top of the differential.”

Al Nicholson had salvaged several vast redwood beams from the Brown’s Canyon Trestle, when that Occidental railroad bridge was dismantled in the mid-1940s.

“He pretty much put those beams up, then built the house around ‘em,” said Worden, who intends to recreate, as closely as possible, that house’s grandest feature: a 1,600-square-foot living room with a curved window, 38 feet long and 13 feet high.

The family had seen many fires down through the years, blazes that burned up the valley, toward them, then “petered out,” he said. The fire they feared, but which had yet to happen, would be a conflagration blown by fierce winds over the mountain behind them.

Worden was driving back from the family’s cabin near Mount Shasta with his wife and business partner, Vickie, when he got a call from his son, Corey.

“You know that fire we always talked about?” said Corey. “It’s here. I’m standing in your bedroom. What do you want me to save?”

The Wordens spent $200,000 — on everything from demolition, debris removal and septic services to architects, soils testers, and geotechnical engineers — before even breaking ground on the new place, which won’t be finished, Eric Worden figures, for at least a year and a half.

“Losing everything is heart-wrenching, in the beginning,” he said. “And then you kind of get used to it. And then you start thinking about what’s new, what’s coming.”

Last November marked the first time in 88 years that the family didn’t host an epic Thanksgiving celebration in that living room. But Worden kept the tradition on life support. As the family has done for half a century, he went to Willie Bird Turkeys on Highway 12 at the end of October and ordered their two biggest birds — then donated them to Meals on Wheels.

“Gonna do the same thing this year,” he said. “I want credit for the party. We gotta make it to 100 years.”

Promise kept

Moments after laying eyes on the ruins of his family’s Los Alamos Road house, Keith Rhinehart spoke these words: “Mom, I’m so sorry.”

Lillian Rhinehart, then 94, had been living in the distinctive A-frame on a promontory overlooking Eagle Rock. She and her husband, Chuck Rhinehart, a professor at Sonoma State University, had moved to the area in 1959 and fallen in love with it.

Chuck died peacefully, in that house, in 2008. The plan had been for Lillian to spend her final years there, as well.

Determined that this should still happen, Keith Rhinehart stood in the ruins of that house a year ago and vowed: “I’m gonna rebuild this sucker.”

Easier said than done, especially during a pandemic. Yet there was Keith Rhinehart, a noted local gadfly, raconteur and recent write-in candidate for the Santa Rosa City Council, standing outside a close-to-finished home earlier this week. Of all the rebuilds on the upper reaches of Los Alamos, his appears to be nearest to completion.

On a suggestion from his girlfriend, who lost her home in the Tubbs fire, Rhinehart consulted Santa Rosa-based Wright Builders. Owner Phil Wright showed them a house his company had finished in Coffey Park.

“Mom walked in,” he recalled, “and she said ‘I love it! Let’s build this one.’”

Instead of drawing up plans from scratch, the Rhineharts hired the architect of that house, the Santa Rosa-based firm Integrated Design, to create a custom home based on the one it had designed in Coffey Park — a huge timesaver. Standing in a vaulted great room as painters worked around him, Rhinehart noted that this house is 6 feet taller than its predecessor, “but basically the same shape.”

All that remains to be done, once the painting is finished, are the floors, countertops and appliances. The builder is committed to finishing by the end of October, though Rhinehart hopes he might cross the line a couple weeks earlier.

Lillian Rhinehart, meanwhile, is going strong at 95. She still drives, and she has no qualms about piloting her car up the sketchy and dramatically steep, narrow driveway to the house. “Well, she’s been doing it for 60 years,” noted her son.

“All things considered, she’s doing great.”

And in a month or so, she’s going home.

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat. com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.