And the cattle instinctively know to move away from the fire, he said. He has 200 cows, not 98 exotic species of animals, from rhinos and giraffes to flamingos and Nyalas. He doesn’t claim to have matched the dramatic rescue made by his Safari West neighbor in 2017. Like he did during the 2017 Tubbs Fire, he helped save his 200 head of cattle on Monday night. SANTA ROSA, CA – OCTOBER 28: Rancher Aaron Lucich talks with this news organization at the Pepperwood Preserve, where he grazes cattle, on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, Calif., on Oct. It seems to me that getting this every two years is the new norm - and we’ve already been lucky twice.”Īt Pepperwood Preserve, where Lucich saved his cattle, the Kincade Fire burned some 30 acres overnight. “The Tubbs fire came up on one side of us, and this fire was on the other side,” said Leo Clamar, standing outside his house in the Larkfield-Wikiup neighborhood on Monday and looking up at the smoky ridge above. Now, freshly painted new houses with trimmed green lawns stand next to wooden shells covered in scaffolding. That included the neighborhood of Larkfield-Wikiup, close to Highway 101, just north of Mark West Springs Road, where scores of homes were destroyed in 2017. On Sunday night and Monday morning, the Kincade Fire that had burned just east of Healdsburg and Windsor over the weekend, made a run into the fringes of the burn scar. Some of the foliage is still dense, turning autumn reds and golds. A drive up Mark West Springs Road looks like a tour of model homes. But two years of rain have turned the rolling California hills golden with grasses again and two years of construction have replaced scores of homes in the same canyons and subdivisions. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)įire is not supposed to re-ignite on a burn scar - the blackened path of a previous fire.

SANTA ROSA, CA – OCTOBER 28: Keo Hornbostel, executive director at the Safari West Wildlife Preserve talks with this news organization, on the outskirts of Santa Rosa, Calif., on Oct. “But at the same time, everyone is focused on, ‘How can I help?’”īut Hornbostel said Monday that the overnight effort was mostly keeping watch: the firefighters kept the red glow from descending the ridge. “Everyone is nervous,” Keo Hornbostel, Safari West’s executive director said Monday in an interview that was interrupted by the screeching of Red-ruffed lemurs nearby. Gustier winds are expected to pick up Tuesday as well. Monday morning, fire engines were parked outside the entrance gates, ready for another night of fighting if the fire changed direction. The same crews up above, that kept the fire away from Pepperwood, kept Safari West safe, too. But this time, he was mostly monitoring and assessing, ready with a hose should the fire come. Like Lucich, Safari West owner Peter Lang who saved every beating heart on his thousand-animal preserve in 2017 with a garden hose, pulled another all-nighter with the Kincade Fire.

Santa rosa wildlife safari