How Roslyn residents came together to prevent catastrophic wildfire

ROSLYN — Doug Johnson was packing to leave his home on a hot August afternoon.

He was only there for a quick visit. The fire danger in Roslyn has led Johnson and his wife, Susan, to spend much of their summers with their daughter and grandchildren in Seattle. A go-bag sits on top of their dining room table, ready at a moment’s notice. He only comes back about once a week to get his mail and take care of the yard.

“We never imagined this when we moved to Roslyn,” he said.

Roslyn, a historic mining town of 950 people and a popular destination for outdoor recreationists, is at the top level of wildfire risk nationally, according to a study by the U.S. Forest Service. Residents and officials have banded together to conduct large-scale fire prevention measures in an effort considered an example for other communities across the West.

Those changes hold lessons elsewhere in the Northwest and in Yakima County, where a fast-moving Slide Ranch Fire destroyed 17 homes near White Swan in June, and the Retreat Fire threated Tieton, damaged a vital irrigation canal and halted traffic on U.S. Highway 12 for weeks east of Rimrock Lake this summer.

Johnson is one of the many people who have stepped up to try to prevent catastrophe in Roslyn. In 2022, he helped start the Roslyn Citizens Wildfire Resilience and Evacuation Committee, a group of residents concerned about fire danger in their community.

He began creating defensible space around his home at least 10 years ago. He pulled out snowberry and lavender bushes along his porch and pruned mountain ash and other trees. This practice is in line with Firewise, a nationwide safety program which recommends clearing foliage and all flammable material within 5 feet of a house and placing screens on vents to catch embers. It also gives recommendations for maintaining a trimmed yard and pruning trees within 30 feet of a home.

The citizens committee had 150 participants and volunteers this year, Johnson said. The Upper Kittitas County Fuels crew, a team of 13 based out of the Roslyn Fire Department, comes by to chip materials left by residents in piles by the side of the road.

For a home with a small yard, creating defensible space might be just a day’s activity. To build defensible space around the town of Roslyn, it’s taken much more time and effort.

About Roslyn

Roslyn is sandwiched between two large tracts of forest, one owned and managed by the city and the other by Suncadia, a resort and private community association that is home to three golf courses, restaurants and a winery. Beyond that lies the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest.

Jeff Adams, the mayor of Roslyn and a descendant of coal miners, is energetic when he speaks about fire prevention efforts. Controlled burns and clearing trees and brush have helped reduce fuel in the Roslyn Urban Forest, a 300-acre piece of land the city acquired in 2004.

“As we walk up here this way, you’ll see it’s night and day difference,” he said as he began to hike up the aptly named Forest Resilience Trail, which was created in 2023 to showcase the fire prevention efforts.

In June, U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, who represents Kittitas County, was here for a visit. Schrier introduced a bill called the National Prescribed Fire Act, which would authorize $300 million for more prescribed burns on federal, state and private lands. Adams said he hopes Schrier’s bill gets passed, calling it a common-sense, bipartisan piece of legislation.

Adams praised the efforts of Johnson and the citizens committee, and also the work of Chris Martin, a local firefighter and the former owner of Basecamp Books and Bites, a bustling café and bookstore in the center of Roslyn and a popular spot for the tourists, hikers, and campers who pass through town. Martin moved his family to Roslyn from Seattle, attracted to the small-town charm that reminded him of his upbringing in upstate New York.

Martin became the town’s emergency management coordinator during the Jolly Mountain Fire in 2017, which burned 36,000 acres in the Cle Elum Ranger District.

It was a turning point for Roslyn. Things were especially tense that Labor Day weekend, with the first full scale callout of all law enforcement personnel in Kittitas County to notify people about evacuations. Kittitas County and the cities of Cle Elum, Roslyn and Ellensburg declared states of emergency, and started working on plans to move people and government services to Ellensburg if things got worse.

Luckily, no structures were damaged, and the plans weren’t fully deployed. But it got people’s attention.

“The city was evacuated and shrouded with smoke and there were 20 some odd fire engines parked in town because they’re worried about embers,” Martin said. “That was like a change-of-underwear moment for the city.

“And it was like, OK, for years, no one’s done anything, and it’s time to start.”

Residents often mention the fire as a wake-up call for the dangers that wildfires presented for Roslyn. Another was the Camp Fire which destroyed much of Paradise, California, and more recently, the 2023 Hawaii wildfires.

After the fire, community members gathered in the Roslyn Yard next to Basecamp Books that October to watch the “Era of Megafires,” a documentary about why the fires were happening and what people could do in response. It was one of several showings around the region, co-sponsored by Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition, which continues to sponsor fire-related film screenings.

Building a fire break

A fire needs three things to start — fuels, oxygen and ignition, Martin recites. “At the end of the day, the only thing that is going to move the needle is reducing those fuels.”

The community built an emergency fire break during the Jolly Mountain Fire because of concerns about ember showers, which can travel for miles.

The barrier is one of several planned or completed which aim to block fire spread. Additionally, burns and clearing treatments have been completed along Cle Elum Ridge to the edge of town, he said. “We’re trying to build infrastructure.”

Martin oversees the UKC Fuels crew, which was created in 2020. It has been doing prescribed burns in a mix of federal, state and city land, and can also deploy to assist fire response.

“Basically, we’re trying to implement the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy,” he said. The strategy is three pronged, to create resilient landscapes, safe wildfire response, and fire adapted communities.

The Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition is a group of local stakeholders that started meeting monthly in 2017 to collaborate on local fire safety: outreach, home hardening, securing grants, working with power utilities and more.

“It’s really the clearing house for that kind of work,” Martin said.

Tony Craven, the current chair of the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition, said it’s not just Roslyn, but the Upper Kittitas County working together as a whole, including Ronald and Cle Elum, with help from Ellensburg.

Craven has deep ties to Roslyn and to firefighting.

The past four generations of the Craven family include a pastor, coal miners and gravediggers for Roslyn’s historic cemetery. The cemetery, nestled among the trees, has graves of generations and communities who came for the promises of the mines — Black, Polish, Italian, Lithuanian, Croatian, and more.

Tony’s father, William Craven, became the first Black mayor in the state of Washington when he was elected to lead Roslyn in 1975.

Tony was the first of five siblings who became wildland firefighters for the U.S. Forest Service.

“It was probably a holdover of me watching red skies over Montana when I was a kid,” Craven said of the start of his career.

In 2001, one of Craven’s brothers, Tom, and three other firefighters died during the Thirtymile Creek Fire which burned north of Winthrop. A memorial for the four was built at Roslyn’s cemetery.

“It’s not supposed to happen,” Craven said. “On the other hand, we all know it could happen.”

Craven said he has known of too many deaths, injuries and entrapments over the course of his 20-year career, which he described as “too long.” But he has continued to work in firefighting, even if he isn’t out digging line. He managed Suncadia’s forest for 10 years and has recently began to oversee a $10 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant grant from the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, on behalf of the Kittitas County Conservation District. The grant money will be used for similar fuels reduction efforts, especially hardening escape routes.

Evacuation routes

One early project of Craven’s, slated to begin next year, is to partner with homeowners to reduce fuels along State Route 903. The road links Cle Elum, Roslyn and Ronald, and heads north to Lake Cle Elum and the Salmon la Sac recreation areas. There are dozens of cabins along the road, along with trails and campgrounds.

Evacuation routes have become a big topic of discussion in Upper Kittitas County. If a fire were to prompt an evacuation on a busy recreation weekend, over 10,000 people might need to leave via State Route 903, he said.

“If there’s a fire, that’s the only way in and it’s the only way out,” Craven said.

The escape route situation is a large reason that Doug and Susan Johnson leave during fire season. Members of the citizens committee, including Susan, have recently been focusing on escape routes.

“We’re in extreme danger,” Doug Johnson said, recalling that people died in their cars while attempting to escape the Camp Fire in Paradise, California.

A changing climate, and community

On Aug. 9, lighting strikes caused three fires between Lake Kachess and Lake Cle Elum.

Over 150 personnel were able to contain the fires to 23 acres. But it was a sobering reminder of the ever present, and growing, danger of living in the 21st century Cascades because of climate change.

Johnson built his home out of cedar in the 1980s, in a time when Upper Kittitas County wasn’t known for fires. He is grateful for the fire safety provided by his metal roof, which was originally built to withstand heavy snow, something he said he doesn’t see as much of any more, and one of the things that initially drew him to the Cascades.

“In the 50 years I’ve lived here, it’s just a completely different climate. We never had smoke. We had tons of snow. Snowfall is anemic now,” he said.

Though Johnson was a schoolteacher in Cle Elum for many years, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the summer of 1976.

“They told us, ‘You’re not going to be fighting fires here. We call this the asbestos district, because it never burns.’”

Much has changed.

Suncadia, a growing getaway

South of Roslyn, not far over the hill from the Johnsons’ house, Phil Hess looks out the window of the newly renovated Suncadia Lodge. Perched above the Cle Elum River, it offers a spectacular view of the 6,000-acre resort.

Suncadia’s master plan is for 3,500 homes, and it’s only halfway built, said Edward Simpkins, director of Suncadia Community Associations. It’s expanding to soon include a new commercial area and a 55-and-older community, called the Uplands.

Hess is a longtime forester, recently honored as Washington State Forester of the Year by the Washington Farm Forestry Association. He worked for many years for Boise Cascade, out of Yakima.

Though Hess has only recently taken over Craven’s responsibilities, he has worked with Suncadia since the start. Craven said Hess is “a wealth of knowledge.” One of his first assignments in the 1990s was to create a fuel break around the perimeter of the entire 6,000 acre property, Hess said. A large portion of the land is held in a conservation trust, preserving much of the pine forest.

Today, Hess has contract crews constantly thinning and clearing areas to reduce fuels on Suncadia property, and they are able to treat about 100 to 200 acres a year.

But risk remains for any community in the trees.

“Fire resiliency does not mean fireproof,” Hess said. “The forest is going to burn. The decision space we have, is how it will burn.”

Suncadia spends a half million dollars on forest health and fire resiliency work every year and is an official Firewise USA community, Simpkins said. Suncadia is also a member of the Kittitas Fire Adapted Communities Coalition and donated the chipper that the Upper Kittitas County Fuels crew uses.

“We’re doing everything we can to avoid what happens in Northern California. That’s not going to happen here,” Hess said.

An example for others

Rose Beaton, a community resilience coordinator with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, believes what Roslyn and its residents are doing to prevent fire should be an example for the West.

The community resilience division of the DNR was created in 2021. Wildfire Ready Neighbors is one of its well-known programs, which assess properties for fire risk.

Beaton worked the phone hotlines for Kittitas County during the 2014 Snag Canyon Fire. That experience lead to not only a professional interest in wildfire management, but an academic one. She is a doctoral candidate studying wildfire management at the University of Idaho and has looked at how communities are adapting across the West.

“I think what Roslyn has been doing is a kind of a role model for other communities across the West in grassroots movement change,” Beaton said. “That’s ideally what you would like to see, is residents working with residents, inspiring change amongst each other.”

Leavenworth and its Chumstick Wildfire Stewardship Coalition is another example of a community working to become fire adapted, Beaton said.

“Small change equals big change,” Beaton said. “Small steps to reduce your wildfire risk in a community can start with one person.”