Fast-growing Fish Creek Fire forces families to evacuate historic cabins, Families hope to save historic cabins packed full of fond memories

Fast-growing Fish Creek Fire forces families to evacuate historic cabins

Families hope to save historic cabins packed full of fond memories.

By Kate Ready

Jackson Hole News&Guide

Via Wyoming News Exchange

JACKSON — With windows boarded up and sealed and the covered porch empty, save for a couple chairs piled in a corner, Alan Sinicki prepared to evacuate his family’s tiny, rustic cabin built of lodgepole pine — ideal fuel for the wildfire headed his way.

A biblical-looking cloud of smoke billowed behind him as the clock inched toward 4 p.m. on Aug. 22. The Fish Creek Fire, fanned by wind and fueled by beetle-killed trees, had been doubling, tripling in size in a matter of days since first being discovered Aug. 16.

“It looked like a mushroom cloud went off on [Togwotee] Pass,” Alan Sinicki said. “I wish they would have let them come through 20 years ago and kill all this beetle kill.”

A Laramie resident, Sinicki was standing outside his family’s two-bedroom, 500-square-foot cabin with his son, Cooper, 16, and his friend, Rodney Fought. Already, two pickup trucks were packed with chairs, tools and antique dishes.

Although crews are now starting to contain the 11,400-acre fire burning southeast of the Togwotee Pass highway, conditions looked dire last week for the 102-year-old Brooks Lake Lodge and the Pinnacle Heights summer homes. The homes are a cluster of cabins that have stood in the Shoshone National Forest since the 1930s.

Twenty or so cabins dot an idyllic meadow beneath the jagged Absaroka Mountains. On an otherwise sunny afternoon, Sinicki and his neighbors were emptying the long-beloved cabins, most of which have been in their families for generations.

Sinicki’s great-grandfather, a Riverton resident and surveyor in the valley after World War II, held the original lease on the cabin. Now, everyone in Sinicki’s family chips in to pay the lease for the cabin, which typically is in use all summer. Alan and his wife, Lisa Sinicki, came up the prior weekend to celebrate their 20th anniversary. That same weekend, lightning ignited the Fish Creek Fire.

Built long before every family member required their own room, the quaint cabin makes up for tight quarters with bunk beds along the walls. Nearby, off the summit of Togwotee Pass are the headwaters of the Wind River. The cabin’s screened-in porch faces Brooks Lake Creek. The nearby meadow, popular with bears, moose and beavers, becomes a lake every June.

“I caught my first fish right down there when I was 6 years old,” Cooper said.

It was a Peanuts-themed Snoopy fishing pole, Alan Sinicki added with a laugh, that landed the beautiful rainbow trout — still one of the biggest fish the family has caught. Sometimes, a simple worm does the trick.

“I’ve seen that river change course three times in my life,” Alan Sinicki said. His bright blue eyes looked across the creek babbling in the last hours of the sun. “One beaver dam changes the entire meadow.”

As the trio packed up, preparing to evacuate to Riverton, Alan Sinicki said he’s seen this coming and has been working to reduce fuels around the cabin for 15 years.

“I weed whacked until I couldn’t weed whack any more,” he said. “I raked all the grass out. I’ve cut down so many trees myself over the years. I stopped counting after 87 and that was five years ago.”

After heaping another box into a pickup truck borrowed from his dad’s neighbor in Riverton — the neighbor simply said “take it” when he heard about the need to evacuate — Alan and Cooper stepped inside the cabin. Immediately the nostalgic smell of lodgepole pine enveloped the nose — a smell of time gone by.

Or something more specific.

“That’s the decades of bacon grease in the rafters,” Alan Sinicki said with a laugh.

The heart of the two-bedroom home is two stoves: a pot-belly heating stove and a wood-burning cook stove courtesy of the Globe Stove and Range Company, an Indiana company founded in 1902. Both are built with American steel.

“This stove probably came in on the railroad in the 20’s or 30’s,” he said. There’s an almost hallowed sense of respect for the antiques that continue to work better than modern appliances.

Those stoves are the only items he desperately wants to take that he simply can’t. They belong here, alongside the bunk beds built into the wall. A pair of hand-carved cross-country skis also adorn the walls. Alan Sinicki’s sister, Jennifer, asked him to pack a pair of antique snowshoes as well, in addition to homemade comforters and oil lamps that used to hang in the bedrooms.

Behind him, Cooper eyes the curtains.

“We have to take those down or Jennifer will be mad,” Alan Sinicki tells the group. Cooper dutifully takes the elk-bedecked curtains off the rod in the kitchen.

“My mother made those curtains in high school for a project,” Alan Sinicki said.

An hour later, with the curtains packed, the winds calm and fingers crossed, the Sinickis wave and drive away with an unconvincing smile for their neighbors, Larry and Merry Evans.

Larry Evans, 77, is slim with a thick head of white hair and mustache to match. His two-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot cabin lies 500 feet across the forest from the Sinickis’ cabin. Sprinklers are soaking down the surroundings.

The retired accountant holds a box with framed Edward Curtis photographs. On this afternoon, he’s already made six trips to a ranch in Dubois where he and his wife, Merry, will be staying while evacuated. He’s dropped off fishing rods, guns and Merry’s favorite dining room table.

The Atlanta residents have owned the cabin for 22 years. At that time, the cabin didn’t have indoor plumbing. Now it has fiber optic cables, a boon for firefighters who tapped into the Internet while working nearby. The firefighters were installing irrigation pumps and cutting down dead trees. Sheriff deputies and emergency managers drove up to offer an update. The Evans’ black lab, Tybee, greeted every new visitor with excitement.

The Evans are the last ones standing in the subdivision. Back home in southern Georgia, the retirees have a farm that used to grow peanuts. Now they mostly hunt and fish.

The waiting is taking a toll on Merry Evans. In February 2023, she had a spinal stroke that paralyzed her from the neck down. In the last year, she’s learned to walk again.

“I’m a little tired,” she said. “I feel much weaker, off balance.”

Her grandson, 10, likes to hunt here, she said, though he hasn’t caught much yet besides rodents. Her 6-year-old granddaughter asked her to please save the kid-sized wicker chairs, which await them every summer on the porch overlooking the meadow.

Around her, firefighters from Teton Valley, Idaho, set up industrial white hoses.

“The firefighters seem determined to save our cabin,” she said, “so hopefully they will.”

At a quarter past five, Larry Evans was still puttering around the lawn while his wife waited in the car, warning that all the restaurants would be closed if they left too late and they’d be forced to eat cheese sandwiches.

Larry Evans, it seemed, may never be ready to leave.

Thirty minutes later, as they drove south into Dubois, the Wyoming Department of Transportation closed Highway 26/287 for the first time since the fire broke out.

But by Monday morning, Alan Sinicki was joyous as snow dusted the mountaintops, the first flakes of the season. He texted: “Couldn’t have been happier to see snow this morning!!!”

This story was published on August 29, 2024.