The canyon was burning. It was a dark night in early November, a new moon, and as the three friends looked out from the dusty rim of Butte Creek Canyon, in the foothills just outside Chico, California, they could see fires dotting the whole length of the landscape at their feet. Dharma LaRocca, Jeb Sisk, and Jason McCord had grown up down there, in a hippie community called Helltown that had once been a gold-mining camp. Now in their 40s, the men knew the territory better than anyplace else on earth. But as they watched the blaze curl like lava among the sycamores and hundred-year-old cottonwoods, they couldn't help imagining they were someplace faraway and exotic. Hawaii, maybe, or Mars.

The fires in the canyon represented the leading edge of a conflagration that had been burning since early that morning. Already it had consumed 20,000 acres, and it was now threatening homes in every direction. Taking backroads in Jason's truck, the three men had driven to the canyon rim, at the top of a rugged dirt track called Center Gap Road, after hearing a rumor that the 20 or so houses that composed Helltown were soon to go.

Exhausted but undaunted, Dharma LaRocca, Jason McCord, and Jeb Sisk pose for a photo that was later shared widely among those who'd evacuated the canyon—and were cheering their friends from afar.

With the power out, the fires in the canyon offered the only illumination for miles, but the burning shrubs of manzanita and bottlebrush, and the booms of propane tanks exploding like distant artillery, helped the men orient themselves within the crumpled terrain. In front of them was the Steel Bridge, a local landmark not far from where Jason lived with his wife, Maria, who was also Dharma's sister, and their four children. But when they figured out where his house should be, they saw only a pall of black smoke. Repeating the exercise all along the creek, they looked for their parents' houses in Helltown, for the place in neighboring Centerville where Jeb lived with his daughter, and for the cemetery where Dharma had buried his wife after a car accident in 2012. From this vantage point, it looked like the canyon as they knew it had been obliterated. “It's gone,” they told one another, though they could each see very well for themselves. “All gone.”

While they watched the fires, the men saw a sudden slash of headlights in the smoke below. They wondered who could still be down there, so long after the fire department had come through waving evacuation orders. It was a truck, that much they could tell, bouncing back and forth in short sprints. Eventually, they realized what they were seeing—or, rather, who: It was their friend and neighbor, a 39-year-old off-duty firefighter I'll call Sam.

Sam, it turned out, had been in the canyon since midafternoon. Like the others, he'd grown up there, and he now lived just outside Helltown, in a house not far from his parents' and his uncle's. Earlier that day, Sam had been up north, three hours away, when he got a text from a friend that the canyon was being evacuated. Driving 90 miles an hour, he worked through a mental checklist the whole way home. Once back in the canyon, he went house to house, pulling furniture and propane tanks off porches to deprive the fire of ready fuel. Now that the flames were getting closer, he was racing in his truck to extinguish spot fires wherever he found them.

When the trio noticed the headlights, Jason called Sam on his phone. “Is that you down there?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

“I can't leave,” Sam told him. “I've got to protect my home.”

Dharma, Jason, and Jeb had come up to the top of Center Gap uncertain about what they'd find. At best, they figured, the rumor they'd heard would prove untrue, and they'd be able to slip back into the canyon to set free the horses and other animals their families left behind during their hasty evacuations. At worst, they'd at least be present to watch Helltown burn. None of them had expected to discover a close friend fighting an uncontrolled fire all alone.