The chit-chat seemed to soothe his nerves, so Keith Rhinehart kept up a steady stream of it as he made his way along Los Alamos Road, to the 25-acre property that’s been in his family for 60 years.
This was late Wednesday morning. On a lunch break from teaching an online class, Rhinehart was in the passenger seat of a car navigating this scenic, oak-lined hilly road, to see if the family’s two homes were still standing.
He hadn’t been on Los Alamos since Sunday night, when the Glass fire made its sudden dash over the Mayacamas Mountains and into east Santa Rosa. Rhinehart had less than an hour to gather belongings and get down the hill.
To make room for his two dogs in his pickup truck during the hasty departure, the 67-year-old — who is running as a 3rd District write-in candidate for the Santa Rosa City Council — tossed out all of his campaign signs.
The farther he got up Los Alamos three days later, the more charred homes he saw, the smaller his other problems seemed.
The Glass fire had destroyed 120 homes in Sonoma County — a number sure to rise as Cal Fire’s inspection teams complete their work — by late Friday night. Taking the brunt of that firestorm in Sonoma were many of the houses along Los Alamos, which wends five sinuous miles from Highway 12 to the north entrance of Hood Mountain Regional Park.
“It’s an amazing road,” said former Santa Rosan Levi Leipheimer, who during his professional bike racing career often could be seen accelerating up the steep pitches of Los Alamos — “the one right after Cougar Lane, that’s gotta be 15%” — then turning around and repeating the climb, over and over and over.
Los Alamos reminds him of some of the ascents in the three-week Tour of Spain: “uneven, really pitchy, steep.”
The road is different things to different people. This is a story of an alluring and sometimes treacherous passage, an account of who lives there, who lived there and what it meant to people before everything around it caught fire.
’A lot of history in this place’
“Look at Wildwood Trail, holy crap,” Rhinehart exclaimed, riding along with a reporter. The fire had singed a vineyard to the right — property owned by the Rowe family. “I went to high school with Chuck Rowe. He was a senior when I was a sophomore.”
Asked the next day how his property had fared during the fire, Rowe replied: “It’s frickin’ toast.” He and a friend, Kenny Caven, saved a dozen pieces of farm equipment by putting them in the middle of the vineyard Sunday night.
“Pretty much everything else burnt down,” Rowe said.
The lost structures included “the big house,” which was completed in 1923 and served at the time as the Rincon Valley Grange Hall. “It was the only place big enough to have dances. Floorboards were 1¼-inch oak,” he said.
A second house was built with timbers salvaged in Forestville by his father, Harold, when he returned from World War II.
When the family sat down to dinner, Chuck Rowe recalled, “if you heard a car going up the hill, you looked up and you knew who they were. That’s how few people lived” then on Los Alamos Road. But “there’s a lot of history in this place.”
According to Rowe family lore, workers were budding a vineyard on the property — the one visible from Los Alamos — when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit.
On Sunday, he and Caven worked past midnight to save equipment and structures. “At that point the fire was in the creek below us, maybe 200 feet away,” Rowe recalled.
“I said Kenny, if you want to live, we gotta go.”
“Man, I never thought this would happen.”
Death of a tradition
The road is often stunning, sometimes menacing, with stretches of it carved out of the mountainside. How steep are its canyons? Chuck Rhinehart, Keith’s father, moved into the area in 1959. He rented a cottage from Dick Violetti, the Rincon Valley fire chief. That cottage later slid down the hillside.
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