This story was produced from a partnership between PBS NewsHour and KVPR.
FRESNO, Calif. – Liz Lawrence was camping with her two daughters over Labor Day weekend in 2020 when they awoke to see smoke billowing on a distant hillside. They were in the Sierra Nevada outside of Fresno, and weren’t aware of any wildfires in the area. When Lawrence asked about it at the camp store, managers said that fire officials had told them there was a fire, but it was too small and too far to be a threat.
But around lunchtime, everything changed. Lawrence watched in horror as flames crested a nearby hill. The fire was barreling toward them and hundreds of others who had packed the campground for the long weekend in the California mountains.
“We tore down camp as quickly as we could, throwing everything in the trailer and the car and telling the girls to get out of their bathing suits and put their tennis shoes on,” she said.
I remember the windows shattering on me, and then it was just instant heat.Liz Lawrence
Lawrence and her family jumped into her Chevy Yukon and drove toward Mammoth Pool Reservoir – a lake two miles away from the campground, and the only place she could think of to stay safe from the flames.
“I had people running toward me, offering money for a ride, and I was just like, ‘get in, get in, get on, get in,’” she said.
In the hasty escape, Lawrence careened into a metal gate that had blown shut across the winding road. The crash pinned the driver’s side doors shut and sent people on her utility trailer flying.
“I remember the windows shattering on me, and then it was just instant heat,” she said. “We were completely – except for the passenger side – surrounded by flames.”
She and her daughters crawled out the other side and ran, along with their passengers, some still in their bathing suits, sustaining burns on their arms and faces. In the chaos, Lawrence and her daughters inadvertently split up. They each jumped into cars with other campers, all fleeing to the same place — the lake, where Lawrence reunited with her daughters – in the hopes that its sandy shoreline and water would provide safe haven.
Mercifully, it did. Everyone camping there that weekend survived – airlifted out that night in a heroic rescue mission carried out by the California Army National Guard.
What those campers had come up against was the Creek Fire, a megafire that would continue to burn for more than three months before being fully contained. It destroyed 850 homes and tore through 380,000 acres of forest, and remains the fifth largest blaze in California’s history.
This winter marks three years since the Creek Fire was fully extinguished, but trauma still follows many of the fire’s survivors.
There are harrowing stories, from people who made screaming 911 calls, or the parents who, like Lawrence, lost track of their children in the woods during the chaos.
But there are also stories of heroism — drivers ramming their cars through flaming trees in order to clear the road, or maneuvering all-terrain vehicles back into the smoldering forest in order to search for missing hikers.
The start of a devastating wildfire
The Creek Fire erupted in September 2020 with historic speed, engulfing 36,000 acres in just 24 hours. Fire officials and media reports at the time described it as “unprecedented,” “aggressive” and “in a class by itself.” The campground, and Mammoth Pool Reservoir, were in its path that first day.
Fires that consume hundreds of thousands of acres have become so commonplace they may feel like a way of life in California, but most of the state’s largest fires have occurred just in the last decade.
Eight of the state’s 10 largest fires – a string of so-called “megafires” that together devoured more than 4 million acres – happened between 2017 and 2021, largely fueled by a combination of climate change-influenced hotter and drier weather, as well as overgrown forests parched by drought and weakened by bark beetle infestations.
When the Creek Fire spread on that first day in 2020, many campers rushed to their cars in just enough time to escape the Sierra’s wooded forest and return to safety.
But once the blaze jumped across the sole road leading out of the campground, Lawrence and her daughters were among hundreds of campers who remained trapped and had no choice but to flee to the lake.
Once there, people took refuge from the smoke inside their cars, or huddled in the water to stay cool. Hours passed before the sound of propellers pierced the darkness; some survivors described the waiting as “an eternity.” Cheers rang out as two military helicopters landed on the sand.
It took three trips for each helicopter, through near-blackout conditions, to airlift all the campers to safety. For some trips, soldiers from the National Guard loaded the choppers beyond their rated capacities, not knowing if they’d be able to return amid worsening fire conditions.
Over the span of six hours that night, the crews managed to rescue 242 people and 16 dogs. Hundreds more would be rescued from other locations in the Sierra in the following days.
Months later, Lawrence drove back into the mountains to recover her Yukon. She found a charred husk of a vehicle, windows gone and nothing recognizable in the utility trailer that had jackknifed in the crash.
The image still haunts her.
“The ‘whys’ is what gets me. Why did we survive that? Why did we make it out of there?” she asked. “There's no reason we should have survived that crash, to have been able to get out the way we did.”
Three years of recovery and healing
Why did we survive that? Why did we make it out of there? There's no reason we should have survived that crash.Liz Lawrence
Moving forward from that weekend looks different for everyone.
Lawrence attributes her own recovery to the close-knit nature of her family, pointing to strong ties she has with her daughters and parents. She has taken up journaling and counseling in the years since, and noted that it was her therapist who suggested she drive back to Mammoth Pool and see her car.
Shortly after the fire, she also rescued a pitbull, Zoey, which she subsequently certified as an emotional support animal.
“She saved me as much as I saved her. She has heard some of those deep scary thoughts in the middle of the night,” she said. “She knows when my mind's getting the best of me and just comes to me, like, ‘I got you mom. I got you. Get out of that scary spot.’”
Lawrence’s daughters also started therapy and still continue treatment. They were just 9 and 11 at the time of the fire.
Other survivors were given the opportunity to meet their rescuers. Last fall, the Fresno chapter of the Army Aviation Association of America held a barbecue to honor the pilots and crews who flew those Creek Fire missions and to reunite them with the people they rescued. The soldiers were also honored at a California State University, Fresno, football game.
Around 70 survivors attended, including Karla Carcamo, who drove three hours from Los Angeles for the event. During the fire, her younger brother, sister and cousins were among a small number of hikers who were lost in the woods.
Carcamo and her family had feared the worst. But, while waiting at the lake, a few groups of campers who had driven back into the woods emerged carrying all the missing hikers. And all were alive. Some had withstood the passing flames by taking refuge under a vehicle parked in a stream. Many sustained severe burns, and were in and out of hospitals for months.
Carcamo said the last few years have been difficult.
“I just cried on the way to work. It was very close to the anniversary and…I just got very, very emotional,” she said. “It doesn’t get any easier.”
For many survivors, support from their respective families has become a bedrock in the healing process.
Nuri Zeledon fled the fire with her husband and baby girl, who is now nearly 4 years old. Zeledon says her daughter doesn’t remember the fire, but they talk to her about it and made her a photo book from that year.
“She couldn't believe it. She's like, ‘wow.’ And she said she wants to say ‘thank you’ to the pilots,” she said.
Like Carcamo, her family also drove from Los Angeles just to take a picture with their rescuers.
“If I could, I would hug [the soldiers] and kiss them and kneel down and say ‘thank you’ for serving us and keeping our family alive,” she said.
There have been new babies in the last three years, too. Raul Reyes, who, along with his wife, had picked up more than a dozen hitchhikers as they fled the flames, became a dad last October.
“It’s amazing … that's another blessing in itself,” Reyes said.
He and his wife, Alex Tettamanti, drove six hours from Las Vegas for the reunion event. Tettamanti said she was choking up when she met the soldiers who rescued her.
“The amount of gratitude I have for them … I have a baby now and that might not have ever been possible,” she said.
The rescued meet the rescuers
Those helicopter flights were harrowing for their crew members, too – including for Chief Warrant Officer Joseph Rosamond, who has flown in many combat areas including Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait.
“I’ve been shot at … but this was by far the most dangerous, most risky thing that I've ever gotten myself into,” he said during an interview with KVPR in 2021.
That night, Rosamond was piloting a Chinook CH-47, a chopper with the capacity to carry 33 people. As nighttime set in and smoke reduced visibility, Rosamond gave his crew the green light to take on as many passengers as necessary to reduce further trips. They loaded in 102. The crew members couldn’t even close the cargo ramp at the back of the aircraft.
It was during the initial ascent away from the lake, engine straining, that Rosamond realized just how full they were. When asked by KVPR if he ever feared for his life during that flight, he replied, “For that 20-minute timespan, yes. There was nothing for sure in that 20 minutes.”
Rosamond could not attend the fall 2023 reunion in Fresno, but other soldiers there said they found peace in meeting the people they had been tasked with rescuing.
“Most of the time when we do a search and rescue or we’re involved in a rescue, we pick up people, we drop them off, we never get to hear what happened,” Brigadier General David Hall said.
At the time of the blaze, Hall was the Fresno-based commander who greenlit the rescue missions. Today, he’s stationed at the Pentagon, and flew out from Washington, D.C., for the reunion barbecue.
Meeting the people they rescued, he said, “is inspiring to us because it reminds us of why we do what we do.”
“When I heard that they're going to be here, I was ecstatic about it,” said Chief Warrant Officer Irvin Hernandez, who piloted one of the rescue helicopters. He said he often wonders how the survivors are doing.
If I could, I would hug [the soldiers] and kiss them and kneel down and say ‘thank you’ for serving us and keeping our family alive.Nuri Zeledon
Chief Warrant Officer Ge Xiong, who was a crew member at the time and now is a pilot, said seeing survivors again was surreal.
“I remember putting little children, toddlers, in the aircraft, and now that I’ve seen a few of them, they're all big now, and that really makes me happy,” he said.
Since the fire, the soldiers’ heroism has been recognized around the country and the world.
In the U.S., the two crews were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the country’s highest award for feats of aviation. At an award ceremony in September 2020, former President Donald Trump presented the awards to the crew members himself.
A year later, the soldiers were flown to London to receive the Prince Philip Helicopter Rescue Award, presented by a British aviation society to those who demonstrate outstanding courage or devotion to duty during helicopter-based search and rescue operations.
What comes next
For many, camping at Mammoth Pool had been a tradition.
Zeledon, Reyes and Tettamanti, for example, belong to an off-roading club that had gone camping there every Labor Day for years.
The Creek Fire didn’t stop those trips; group members said the community built through the club is still paramount. But it did force them to rethink camping in heavily forested areas prone to fire.
“Let’s just say, the last few years we've been closer to water,” said Reyes. However, he continued, “we actually have plans to go back to the same location next Labor Day.”
Lawrence, too, hopes to return to Mammoth Pool this coming summer. Until the fire in 2020, she had been camping there every summer since she was a kid. This year, she’ll have all-new camping gear and a brand new car and trailer. It’ll be the first time her daughters have been back to the burned area since the fire.
On a recent fall afternoon, she sat in a prayer garden near a Fresno church where she teaches preschool. She usually likes to take her lunch breaks there, but on this day she reflected on the fire and her harrowing escape. Despite the catastrophe, she says the experience actually brought her and her daughters closer.
That mother-daughter bond is reinforced by a tattoo of three elephants Lawrence now wears on her forearm. The biggest of the three is pulling the others with her tail, “literally leading them through” wherever life takes them next, she said.
“The girls can tell when I need their love just as much they need mine,” she said. “Everybody is like, ‘You and your girls just get each other in a different way.’ I'm like, ‘Well, we've kind of been through some scary stuff.’”
