PARADISE, Calif. — Rex Stewart was broke when he landed in Paradise, Calif., more than 40 years ago. But he found work as a carpenter, helping build parts of this mostly modest town of retirees and commuters tucked away in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

On Saturday, after escaping what is now the most destructive and one of the deadliest fires in California history, he stood outside an evacuation shelter with no more to his name than the coat he had on and a winter cap with a peace symbol on it.

“Paradise is gone,” Mr. Stewart, 66, said, pulling on a cigarette. “There’s nothing to go back to.”

Fires continue to rage on both ends of California, spreading with breakneck speed and displacing hundreds of thousands of people in a state where a once-seasonal worry has become a near-constant terror. At least 23 are dead in the so-called Camp Fire, about 100 miles north of Sacramento, and two others have died in fires near Los Angeles.

With the discovery of 14 more bodies on Saturday, the Camp Fire surpassed the death toll in last year’s Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people and was the third-deadliest fire in the state’s history until now. The deadliest, the Griffith Park Fire in 1933, killed 29 people.