The Shepherds followed their dreams to a ridge in Mendocino County. In a flash of flame, everything changed

REDWOOD VALLEY, Mendocino County — Up a dirt road that snakes past pine trees and marijuana patches, on a mountain so remote it has no name, the ring of a cell phone pierced the quiet in the little red house.

Outside, a dry storm gathered. Gusts approaching 75 mph pushed at the windows and stripped needles from pines. Sara Shepherd, 40, and her husband Jon, 44, were in bed when he answered the call.

A blaze had sparked near Potter Valley, 5 miles to the east, a neighbor said. Flames were racing over the hills toward their homes. They needed to evacuate. Now. Jon had barely hung up when a second neighbor called: “What’s going on? I hear a fire.”

“Here we go again,” Sara joked.

It was nearly midnight on Sunday, Oct. 8, 2017. The generator that powered their home hummed as she and Jon flicked on the lights and told their children — 17-year-old Kressa and 14-year-old Kai — to pack their backpacks. The teenagers, faces heavy with sleep, were irritated. The family had stayed up late after a sailing trip with friends on San Francisco Bay. There was no school Monday.

Kressa grabbed her art portfolio, Jansport backpack and dachshund, Paige, and slid into the backseat of Sara’s Honda Pilot.

A cloth bag by the front door already held passports, birth certificates and cherished photos. Fire had reached the edge of the property four months earlier, and the family had never unpacked it. Sara loaded the bag into her SUV, then took a few minutes to help Kai disassemble his homemade computer, stacking the pieces in the back.

The family caravanned down the steep dirt road to Redwood Valley, Sara in the lead with Kressa and Kai, Jon following in his old Toyota truck with their Walker coonhound, Tucker. They could hear propane tanks exploding. The fire was close.

It would be dubbed the Redwood Fire, one of a series of massive blazes that have fundamentally altered California in a wildfire crisis driven by the warming climate. In the 17 months since the Shepherds fled their home, nearly 150 people have died, tens of thousands have lost their homes and whole towns have been ruined.

Stories of horror and heroism have emerged that once would have been unthinkable: Santa Rosa residents submerging themselves in swimming pools to escape certain death; a tornado of flames tossing a firefighter’s truck through the air in Redding; an encampment of fire refugees living in a Walmart parking lot in Chico.

But few have suffered as Sara and Jon Shepherd have. That night on the mountain, they made it less than a half-mile before flames fueled by madrones and oily manzanita swept across the Honda’s windshield. Sara braked so abruptly that Jon rear-ended her. Their vehicles were about to catch fire. Sara twisted to face her teenagers in the backseat, their faces illuminated by the blaze.

“Get out, we’ve gotta go,” she said. “Run!”

They built the little red house on 72 acres atop a ridge, 4 miles north of the hamlet of Redwood Valley — population 1,729 — and 15 miles north of the county seat of Ukiah.

Sara and Jon had grown up in Mendocino County, embracing the wilderness that spreads north as suburban office parks and subdivisions cede to the farms and redwood forests of the Lost Coast.

It was a late spring day in 2010 when Jon first brought Sara to the ridge, gunning his truck up the access road. They’d been married nine years. The mountain was in bloom, and hawks circled above. Jon parked and led his wife to what he called “the magic spring.” Sara scooped water into her hands and drank from the aquifer.

“As long as we have water,” Jon promised, “we’ll have everything we need.”

That June, they bought the property. They rented out their home in Willits, 9 miles to the northwest, for extra cash, and moved in with Sara’s parents in Redwood Valley. Sara taped a new handwritten note to the bathroom mirror each year: This year we are going to frame the walls. This year, we are going to build the house. Kai and Kressa, then 7 and 10, would read them as they brushed their teeth

Jon was a contractor and two decades earlier had partnered with a childhood friend to start his business, Nor Cal Powder Coating. Sara worked at the Safeway in Ukiah as a bakery manager, then a bookkeeper, largely to provide health insurance. Jon formed the house’s building pad, framed the walls, shingled the roof. He hired help to install the septic tank and lay the cement foundation. They built their home as money came in.

The children grew old enough to resent their parents’ plan to move off the grid, where there wasn’t cell service or internet. Kressa had become a gifted artist, cloaking her face with a curtain of dark hair when she drew. She was funny and outgoing, like Jon, while Kai, reserved and observant, took after Sara. He had her deep dimples and impish smile. A natural athlete, he gravitated to baseball and wrestling and played saxophone in the school band.

The Shepherds moved into the little red house in April 2016. Its three bedrooms ringed a central living area with a woodstove. Outside, they planted fruit trees and a garden with tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and squash. They planned to install solar power. They hung a rope swing that arced over the hillside, and as they swooped, the children felt like they could almost touch the trees with their bare feet.

MacKenzie Hanssen, a friend of Kressa’s, lived nearby with her younger sister and father, Paul. Life on the ridge was “very old-fashioned,” she said. “We always found ways to be teenagers, even on the mountain. We would meet halfway between our houses and hang out together and watch movies. We always wanted to go into town, which was frustrating, but we found ways to entertain ourselves.”

In those first months, the family noticed that a black bear had tracked paw prints in the dirt. Jon saw the animal once from a distance. They celebrated Sara’s 40th birthday. They planned for the future.

Behind the Shepherds, the fire launched cinders into the canopy of pines. Jon jumped from his truck but then scrambled back to unlatch the driver’s door. In his haste, he had locked Tucker inside.

The four of them and the two dogs ran back up the steep dirt road — the only clear path — covering their noses with their shirtsleeves. Flames surrounded them, and fist-size embers streaked by like comets. Kai’s asthma flared and he struggled to breathe. He fell behind.

“Are we going to die?” the boy asked, panting.

“I don’t know,” Jon said, dropping back with him. “I don’t know.”

Sara turned around as her son, with no other choice, took a deep breath of superheated air and tried to leap through a thick curtain of flames burning at temperatures upward of 1,500 degrees. Moments later, the inferno overtook the rest of them, the heat washing over their bodies.

“Cover your faces,” Jon yelled. “This is it!”

When Sara regained consciousness, she was curled against an embankment near Kressa. Her daughter’s legs poked from her pink pajama shorts, flesh melted to the bone. Sara croaked her name once, then fell silent, her throat badly burned.

They were still lying against each other when their neighbor, Paul Hanssen, found them. He and his girlfriend’s chocolate Labrador had sheltered in a metal trailer on a gravel lot, with Paul dumping water from a gallon bucket over their heads to counter the heat.

He found Kai facedown on the ground near his mother and sister, unmoving. He had burns on up to 80 percent of his body.

Paul covered Kressa’s legs with a blanket. Burn victims struggle to regulate their temperature, and she was shivering. He stripped off his shirt, submerged it in the family’s cracked water heater and squeezed droplets into Sara’s and Kressa’s mouths.

Jon was already hiking downhill for help when Paul arrived. Partially protected by his heavy work jacket and leather boots, he was still able to walk, though just barely, after the flames swept by.

A little after 3 a.m., Brendan Turner, the acting chief of Redwood Valley’s fire department, parked just below the Shepherds’ property. The valley forms a bowl below the mountains, and above him the firestorm appeared to swirl like a hurricane. In 23 years of firefighting, Turner had never seen such extreme conditions.

As the chief talked with a Mendocino County deputy sheriff about evacuation orders, their trucks paralleling each other, a figure materialized from the thick black smoke, crying for help. The desperate man struggled to hold his jeans up. Soot blackened his face, and his shoulder-length hair was singed. Sheets of flesh flapped from his hands.

“Walk toward us,” Turner shouted, meeting him halfway. “What’s your name?”

Turner had known Jon Shepherd for most of his life. Their mothers worked together at Ukiah Unified School District, and the Shepherds were well-known and beloved in Redwood Valley. But Turner didn’t recognize him.

“My family is on the hill,” Jon implored. It had taken him two hours to walk 1 mile. “I’m pretty sure Kai is gone.”

Turner loaded him into an ambulance and called for help. The fire had the potential to become a mass casualty incident, he realized. He would find out later that two of the Shepherds’ neighbors had died as they tried to evacuate: Steve Stelter, 56, found near the burned husk of his van, and his girlfriend, Janet Costanzo, 71, who was recovered from their home.

Soon, a team of firefighters, nearly all friends or acquaintances of the Shepherds, was hacking a path through smoldering brush and downed oaks until they reached Sara and Kressa. They moved them onto hard backboards and settled them in the bed of a red pickup, driving the mile downhill to safety. Hot air whistled past as they jostled painfully over rocks and debris.

How the fire swept through the valley Wind-carried embers from Potter Valley start a fire at 12:30 a.m. After receiving urgent warnings from neighbors, Jon Shepherd and his family decide to evacuate their remote home. Wife Sara, daughter Kressa and son Kai load into an SUV. Jon and the family dog follow in his truck down the steep dirt road toward Redwood Valley. In less than half a mile, a wall of flames blocks their escape. They abandon their vehicles and run back toward the house. Moments later, flames overtake them. Sara, Kressa and Kai lie motionless. Jon is badly injured, but manages to hike downhill for help. Just after 3 a.m., he runs into Fire Chief Brendan Turner.

The rescuers covered Kai with a tan sheet, leaving his body on the road where he had fallen. The coroner would find that he had died from his burns and smoke inhalation. The kid with the wide smile and deep dimples, whom Sara always called her “young warrior,” would be one of nine people claimed by the Redwood Fire, which also destroyed 543 homes.

At 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, three helicopters departed from Ukiah Valley Medical Center. Three patients headed to three burn centers: Jon to St. Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco, Sara to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento and Kressa to Shriners Hospitals for Children in Sacramento.

Each had third-degree burns, meaning the fire and heat had scorched every skin layer and, in some places, the underlying fat and muscle. Sara and Kressa sustained burns on about 60 percent of their bodies. Jon’s burns covered nearly half of his.

The fire burned Kressa’s legs in ways that would never heal, forcing doctors to amputate both below the knees shortly after she arrived. Amputations are common in major burn cases when the blood supply is cut off. Later, when Kressa developed a fungal infection, doctors removed her knees and some femur bone.

At hospitals across the street from each other, Sara and Kressa were both treated by Dr. Tina Palmieri, a tall, lanky woman with bobbed brown hair and an exacting work ethic. She knew the treatments would be difficult and painfully slow. Without skin, the body has no natural barrier to infection.

Normally, Palmieri said in an interview, a patient spends about one day in the hospital for every 1 percent of their body burned. Wildfire injuries are different, she said, because they are caused by a combination of direct flame and ambient heat.

“Patients tend to get really dehydrated,” Palmieri said. “It’s like being in your oven and then catching on fire.”

Sara, still unconscious since being found, would have eight surgeries. Specialists scraped off her burns and grafted new skin shaved from her backside with a tool resembling a cheese slicer. Guests visited in rotation, sweating in blue paper gowns and thick rubber gloves. Because patients can’t regulate their own temperatures, burn units are warmed to 90 degrees.

Across the street, Kressa, also unconscious, went through five surgeries. Her face was a translucent mask of grafted skin, stapled in patches like a quilt. Her thick dark hair was shaved; her tiny nose ring had burned off. Doctors stitched the lids of her badly burned eyes closed to keep them moist, and she wore plastic goggles. They didn’t know if she had lost her vision.

When Kressa’s immune system allowed it, her friends visited — high school juniors struggling to balance part-time jobs and homework with worry and grief. Kressa’s best friend, Lillian Klinger, was overcome with anxiety. She wondered if Kressa was going to survive, if the two of them would move to Humboldt County someday, the way they had planned. Horrible things like this only happened to other people, she thought.

Sara’s younger sister, Mindi Ramos, began reading “Harry Potter” to Kressa, starting with the first novel, “The Sorcerer’s Stone.” They would have time for the entire series, she thought. But her niece lived only through the fifth chapter.

On Oct. 29, 2017 — 21 days after the fire, 11 days after Kressa went into cardiac arrest — she stopped responding to pain and her organs began to fail. The cause of death was listed as anoxic brain injury, meaning her brain was deprived of oxygen.

That Sunday evening, three nurses and five family members, including Mindi, linked arms as Kressa’s life-support machines whirred to a stop. They touched her hands and talked to her, sharing favorite memories and encouraging her to let go. Everyone sobbed.

“You remember every single one,” Palmieri said. “You never forget.”

As relatives and the community mourned, Sara and Jon, still highly sedated in their intensive care units, were oblivious, unaware they had lost their second child.

Weeks passed. In Redwood Valley, the winter rains finally came. Storms poured on the Shepherds’ ruined home, pushing ash down the mountain. Doctors in the burn unit at UC Davis instructed Sara’s loved ones not to talk with her about the blaze, or about her children, unless she asked. But Sara never did. She suffered from anoxia, a neurological condition caused by suffocating from smoke, and powerful doses of fentanyl also clouded her thinking.

At the 16-bed Bothin Burn Center at St. Francis in San Francisco, doctors had considered amputating both of Jon’s hands, but instead severed just four charred fingertips on his left hand. In November, Jon finally asked his brothers about his daughter. They gently told him the truth. But by the next day, his mind scrambled by pain medications, Jon had forgotten. He asked again. And again. And again.

Jon’s goal was to see Sara — the woman he had loved since she was 15 and he was 20 — so he pushed to lower his doses of painkillers and meet milestones. The tube in his trachea was removed and the hole plugged. He ate solid food. He drank water. On Dec. 1, 2017, shortly after his 45th birthday, he was discharged and transferred to UC Davis in Sacramento for inpatient therapy.

The Firefighters Burn Institute Regional Burn Center is a modern glass-and-steel building covering 13,000 square feet, its long, winding hallways sliced by glass doors. Mindi pushed Jon in a wheelchair through the byzantine grid to Sara’s room. A “Wonder Woman” poster was taped to the wall. Sara and Jon hadn’t seen each other for nearly two months, the longest stretch in 25 years.

Sara thought they were in heaven, maybe, because everything seemed white and too bright. Jon’s sandy hair, which he’d worn shoulder-length, was trimmed. They held gauze-wrapped hands and cried. Jon didn’t know how to tell her that their children were gone. Finally, he spoke.

“It’s only you and me now.”

Sara was learning to walk again, to brush her teeth. Three months had passed since the fire. She’d been discharged from the intensive care unit but she and Jon remained in Sacramento for inpatient therapy. Now, in late February, it was time to return to fire-scarred Mendocino County, if only for a few days. A memorial service for Kai and Kressa at Ukiah High School was scheduled for Feb. 25. Private, no press.

Two days before, they picked up their children’s remains at Eversole Mortuary in Ukiah. Jon carried Kai’s black urn while Sara’s father, Simon Ramos, held Kressa’s gold one. Their names were labeled on the bottoms. Sara received her son’s watch, and suddenly his death felt tangible. She broke down in the parking lot, crying and clinging to her father. Simon buckled the urns into the front seat of his truck. They drove to In-N-Out Burger for lunch.

Sara didn’t want to be seen. Pink scars ridged her neck. Her hair had fallen out in clumps. She considered wearing a gauzy veil to the memorial, then abandoned the idea and selected a long-sleeve purple dress that covered her arms. She’d ordered 10 pairs of shoes online to fit her swollen feet. The beige boots — extra wide, three sizes larger than normal — were the only ones that fit.

Jon had never worn a suit, not even for his wedding. His sister helped him choose a black one, along with a tie and a Stetson hat from a store in Sacramento. On a sheet of notebook paper, he penned a speech, tucking it into his pocket. He cherished his privacy — yet another reason they had moved to the mountain. But for the community that had raised him and his family, he would expose his grief.

“When you outlive your own children, that’s probably the worst thing in the world,” said Dan Stearns. The principal of Eagle Peak Middle School, where Kai had attended eighth grade, Stearns was the memorial’s organizer. “The impossible thing is trying to make sense of how such a bad thing could happen to such great people.”

At the high school, volunteers pulled wooden bleachers lined with padded seats from the walls and adjusted a blown-up photo of Kai and Kressa captured on their property just before Christmas in 2016. In the glossy print, set under an archway of purple flowers, the kids have their arms wrapped around each other, grinning.

A group of firefighters that included Brendan Turner, the acting chief who had found Jon, draped an American flag from a ladder truck out front. Some wore civilian clothing, not wanting to call attention to themselves. The first hours of the fire still haunted Turner and other first responders.

More than 800 people packed the auditorium, the largest space available in Ukiah. Sara and Jon waited in a separate room until the crowd was seated. All of it seemed too much, too frenetic. They finally took seats near the front, Jon steadying Sara as she walked with a cane to her folding chair.

Unfolding his notebook paper, Jon spoke first. Was he still a father, even without children? His was a hero’s guilt. He had delivered help for his family — but it had come too late.

“I will never understand why you were taken and I live,” he said, his voice breaking.“I wish you were here. I am truly sorry I couldn’t save us. My Kressa, my Kai, I am so proud to be your dad. I will always miss you. Living without you fills me with sadness; part of me thinks we should have gone with you. I had to live for your mom. Apart, we couldn’t move on.”

Friends of Kai and Kressa followed, sharing stories that were new to Jon and Sara. The teenagers also wrote memories on cards with a black Sharpie. The middle school band performed, one saxophone player short. Almost everyone — people whose lives had intersected at sports practices, art shows, school fundraisers, farmers’ markets — lined up to hug Jon and Sara.

Soon after the memorial, Sara and Jon moved to Ukiah. They bought a single-story home and a tandem e-bike to ride around town. While Kressa’s dachshund had likely died in the fire, a neighbor had found Tucker, his paws badly burned, and returned him. They went on long, slow walks with the hound.

Up on the ridge above Redwood Valley, a real estate agent staked a for-sale sign.

As the Shepherds tried to heal, so did those around them. Everyone coped in their own way. Chief Turner had been taught to compartmentalize during emergencies, but seeing Jon emerge from the burning ridge had been too much. Less than a year after the blaze, he quit firefighting to teach health occupation classes at Ukiah High School.

One of Kressa’s friends finished high school early because she couldn’t bear to attend class without her. Another suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The community lived in the fire’s ruin; blackened skeletons of trees and homes lined the roadways. Progress would be slow. By late March, only 58 of 543 homes destroyed by the blaze had been rebuilt.

Sometimes, people recognized Sara at Ukiah Natural Foods as she shopped and collapsed into her, seeking comfort. Her anger would flare. Having lost everything, she had trouble soothing others who seemed to have lost nothing. She preferred talking to children, who asked her uncomfortable questions without flinching, giving her the opportunity to share her story. To simply say: “We were in a wildfire and were badly burned.”

Everyone knew of the Shepherds’ loss — from workers at the DMV to state legislators — but no one really knew their pain. She and Jon had lost their home, their healthy bodies, their children. They knew they had to move on, but they hated the phrase “moving on.”

“I had a sense that the community had started to move on without me,” Sara said. “And here I was beginning my journey of coming home. I was a mother for so many years, and I’m not a mother anymore.” She paused. “I mean, I’ll always be a mother. But the task of raising children isn’t there anymore.”

They filed a lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. after state investigators said the Redwood Fire was caused by trees falling into power lines. They drew on Social Security and disability pay for income. Fire insurance helped pay for their new life. So did community fundraising. Friends sold wristbands, T-shirts and car stickers reading, “Holding Up Hope for the Shepherds.” Some left fresh flowers on their doorstep. One donated a two-year pass to Yoga Mendocino.

Their healing skin itched, so she and Jon placed plastic back scratchers and bottles of special lotion around their new home. Sara had to learn again how to measure rice and beans at the grocery store and to feel comfortable cooking dinner on a gas flame. She bought Legos to accustom her sensitive fingertips to pain and short storybooks to stretch her wounded brain. She began taking Zumba classes, something Kressa had loved.

They rented a lake house in Ukiah with friends for a few days and went swimming. Sara wore a long-sleeve tiger print rash guard to protect against sunburn and paddled in the shadows. They ate with friends at busy restaurants and visited Jon’s brother in Tennessee. They tried to re-engage with the world.

“I promise I will still make you laugh every day,” Jon had told Sara in the hospital. And he did.

Watching the Shepherds take steps in their recovery, Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, a friend of Sara’s father, said he couldn’t imagine their altered life. “I have two kids, and I’ve certainly put myself through the thought process of what I would do,” he said. “The answer is I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Feeling strong enough, and against Dr. Palmieri’s advice, Sara and Jon decided to attend the late-summer Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Jon bought a minibus from a church group and retrofitted it, adding air conditioning and wood paneling. They had gone the previous two years and had planned to take Kressa this time. Instead, they attended in her honor.

In the festival’s communal temple, they arranged photos of Kai and Kressa with their favorite foods, blueberries and Cheez-Its. Before the temple was set ablaze to mark the end of Burning Man, they made sure to remove the photos.

Sara and Jon thought they would never go back to their barren property. But 18 months after the Redwood Fire, it is all that remains of their life before. It still feels like home.

Not returning, they slowly realized, would only deepen their pain. It would be choosing not to remember when the land was still green, the children swung into the sky and the house rose wall by wall.

So now they visit the mountain often, walking over prints left by foxes and turkeys and the black bear. They hike to the tallest peak, where they used to decorate a pine each December, stringing it with dried cranberries and popcorn. Kai would carry a flag on his back to mark how high he had climbed.

Sara touches the soil where deputies collected her son’s body. “I think I’m still in a fair amount of shock,” she said on a recent spring day, the air warm with sunshine. “I haven’t even begun to touch the surface of my grief.”

Kressa would be 19 this year, Kai 16. Mail still comes for them, thick art school pamphlets and baseball camp brochures. Certain memories of them remain extraordinarily bright. Before the phone call broke the silence that October night, before the wildfire destroyed so much, there was water.

On their last afternoon as a family, the Shepherds sailed on San Francisco Bay with friends and ate dinner at a restaurant in Sausalito. Kai rode on the bow, waves spraying in his face. Kressa’s silky dark hair whipped in her face. The sunset over the ocean was as glorious as anything Sara had ever seen.

Sara remembers how Kressa, always so independent, used to hike the long dirt access road to meet friends, how she would hum in her sleep, how she wanted to swim in the turquoise waters of French Polynesia. She recalls how hard-headed Kai could be, though so sensitive and curious. How he loved “Star Wars” and touch football.

“Nobody can understand,” Sara said one day, “except Jon and I.”

Someday, they plan to rebuild. Probably not a house, but something small, like a yurt. The for-sale sign on the lot is gone, the debris is cleared. New vines wrap the blackened tree trunks. The spring still flows.