Elise Wolf found out Monday what happened to her home and the longtime Native Bird Care rescue center that she and her husband run on 40 acres a few miles outside Sisters.
She and her husband, Whitney Lowe, fled Saturday, releasing some birds in their care before they left and taking others with depending on their medical state, she said.
Like many of the nearly 4,000 homes threatened by the Flat fire, their property sits near Whychus Canyon, an area northeast of Sisters where new residential development has increasingly built up over recent decades.
When Wolf arrived home at 10 a.m. Monday, she said she found the central Oregon wildfire had jumped their house, thanks to years of work clearing sagebrush from its immediate vicinity while nurturing the surrounding habitats of elk, birds and bunnies.
But the Flat fire “checkerboarded the rest of the property,” Wolf said, laying waste to aviaries and other Native Bird Center facilities.
After just celebrating its 15th anniversary, she said, Native Bird Care won’t operate for the foreseeable future.
“The property is blackened,” Wolf said.
The Flat fire, which has exploded to about 22,000 acres since it started last Thursday, has destroyed at least four homes and a half-dozen other structures, officials said. The cause of the fire, which started on private land approximately seven miles southwest of Culver, remains under investigation, according to an Oregon Department of Forestry spokesperson.
Local and state officials struck a cautiously optimistic note Monday as the fire stood at 5% contained.
They acknowledged unpredictable embers could carry on the wind and spark fire closer to Sisters, the community of about 3,000 beloved as a gateway into the Three Sisters Wilderness and for its antique, cowboy and art shops.
“We have a lot of resources poised for that exact scenario,” said EJ Davis, the Department of Forestry spokesperson.
More than 1,200 fire personnel are working to control the fire after Gov. Tina Kotek last week invoked the Emergency Conflagration Act to direct more state resources to local agencies fighting the fire.
The Flat fire has been carried along in low-lying grass and juniper, the latter of which can “torch” — projecting embers a quarter- to half-mile in hot, dry and windy conditions like Monday’s, Davis said.
Parts of central Oregon experienced rain, but it wasn’t immediately clear if it was enough to dampen fuels, she said. Possible thunderstorms could bring erratic gusts of wind that may increase the rate of fire spread, she said.
Sisters Mayor Jennifer Letz said residents can no longer expect to take days to prepare their homes when wildfires start in the area.
“That’s definitely not the scenario anymore,” said Letz, who spent years as a wildland firefighter and owns a wildfire consultancy with her husband.
Letz and other local officials are “hammering” the message that homeowners must prepare their properties for risks before the fire season begins by removing vegetation, woodpiles and other hazards from around their houses, she said.
And before evacuating if they have time, residents should drag items like trash cans and patio furniture away from their homes, she said. Embers land on those items, which can then burst into flames and catch on the house’s siding, she said.
Summertime in Sisters typically draws throngs of tourists to shops like Stitchin’ Post, which notified customers that its hours remained unchanged even with the fire and smoke.
But the store wasn’t completely unaffected: Co-owner Valori Wells evacuated Friday from her home of more than two decades on the Whychus Canyon rim to stay with her parents in Sisters.
Wells said she and neighbors have become a “firewise community” by clearing dead sagebrush and doing other work to make their homes defensible against wildfires.
“We’ve all been doing massive cleanup,” she said.
She and her family on Saturday night watched a webcam feed of the fire that looked right onto the canyon and her home.
“We watched the fire explode through the canyon,” Wells said. “It was terrifying.”
But she could also see the rapid response of firefighters trying to keep pace as the fire marched through the canyon, she said.
Air tankers dumped fire retardant on her home, turning it pink, she said. So far, she said, the fire has spared her home.
“You live on this edge of anxiety and fear and hope and faith,” Wells said.
Jessica Nylund moved to Oregon with her family from Texas and, after a brief stopover in Redmond, found a plot of land on the Aspen Lakes Golf Course east of Sisters to build their dream home.
On Saturday evening, they found themselves hosing down the four-bedroom ranch-style house and putting sprinklers on the roof as they prepared to leave.
What appeared to be “massive mushroom cloud of dark smoke” loomed overhead while ashes floated around them, Nylund said.
“Is this really happening?” she said she wondered at the time. “Is everything that we have going to burn up?”
A friend in Redmond opened their home to the family and that’s where they’ve stayed since the weekend. Nylund spoke by phone from her car on the way to pick up her daughter from volleyball practice from school in Sisters.
“You have to do normal things. But at the same time, it’s not normal,” Nylund said. “You just have to keep going. You don’t have a choice. I’m not going to have her miss practice.”
Nylund was among the many residents who expressed gratitude for the firefighters. She said she goes to bed at night exhausted but thinks about they must be even more exhausted.
The family’s home survived, she said.
“I have a lot of confidence in our firefighters,” Nylund said.
Wolf and Lowe have been staying on her family’s property in Bend, in a trailer from the bird sanctuary.
On Monday morning, Wolf surveyed the damage at their Whychus Canyon spread with a mix of grief and relief. While many of her cherished old growth junipers had gone up in flames, firefighters had managed to save some parts of Native Bird Center.
“Somehow they saved one of our aviaries and even some of the trees around it,” she said, “so bless their hearts.”
Wolf has come to view life through a bird’s eye, she said, after caring for so many of them.
She believes the Native Bird Center will be reborn, she said. The birding community has already shown an outpouring of support to help rebuild, including through donations, since she reported the damages.
And she found hope in this sight:
“This morning, my feeder was full of a bunch of a little goldfinches that I just released three days ago,” Wolf said. “They all survived.”
— Jonathan Bach covers housing and real estate. Reach him by email at jbach@oregonian.com or by phone at 503-221-4303.
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