After hauling timber to different spots around central Utah all day, Greg Pearson walked into the gas station on Junction’s Main Street, a small town of about 200 people on Highway 89 in Piute County.
Driving trucks is his day job, but he’s also Junction’s mayor and fire chief. Over the last couple of weeks, he’s worn both hats as the Cottonwood Fire, the largest in the nation, burns across Beaver and Piute counties.
He sat down in a booth, cleaned his glasses, and recounted what happened after the fire sparked June 22. He got the call the next evening that it was making its way toward Junction. He said he immediately put the call out to his small team of local volunteer firefighters.
“We got everything ready, got geared up, headed out to do our thing, and the fire was on right on top of us,” he said.
He and his crew originally set out to protect structures and homes embedded in the mountain ranges that surround Junction. The scene was chaotic.
“You had no idea what was really happening, but you could feel the heat of the fire, and it was all tree’d in, so we really couldn't see it,” he said.
As they fought to protect a cabin, a voice crackled over the radio telling them to “get out of there now.”
The team was forced to leave the cabin and get to safety.
“I've been on a lot of fires, and you know there is, there is no, there's no second chances, if it, if it's at you and on you, you're in trouble,” Pearson reflected.
As hot and dry weather fuels an already destructive fire season in Utah this summer, fighting the blazes has been a collaborative effort. Several state and federal agencies are still trying to contain the Cottonwood Fire, clear roads and assess damage.
At a June 29 community meeting, Danon Hulet with Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands told residents from the Beaver area that 150 total structures have been lost in the massive fire.
“That's anywhere from an outbuilding, an RV, a total structure, a condo under one roof with multiple units, so that number could be fluctuating as we continue to do the assessments over the next coming days,” he said.
Hulet added that around 130 structures were saved and remain standing with no damage.
A few miles south of Junction is the little town of Circleville. It has a population of around 500 people. Heather Sudweeks has lived there for 26 years.
Just before 3 a.m. on June 24, an emergency alert on her phone jolted her awake. The message warned that Circleville's evacuation status had been raised to "READY," signaling residents to prepare to leave should things get out of hand.
Having gone to bed early, she had no idea how close the fire had come. Her first instinct was to call her husband, who owns a tow truck and was out on a job at the time.
“I got up and called him because as I walked past my one window, I saw it out my window,” she said before getting emotional. “Yeah, it did honestly look like it was coming straight into town,” she added.
Teams stopped the fire a few miles outside of Circleville, but the burn scar is visible from the main street.
Sudweeks and her husband own the local store called “Stans Merc,” which stands for Stan’s General Mercantile, a place to pick up milk, horse feed and ammunition.
In the days following the alert, the store became an “information highway” for locals. Sudweeks explained that she and her colleagues had family who were firefighters, and so she was able to fill in the blanks for folks.
As days passed, people started to use the store for more charitable reasons, donating money for firefighters to buy groceries. When neighboring towns lost their power, Sudweeks opened her refrigerator and made room for other local stores’ produce to keep it fresh for them.
It was this spirit of rallying around each other in the face of an emergency that made Greg Pearson smile as he sat in the Junction roadhouse.
“Like I say, people really, people really get close when this type of a deal happens, you know,” he said.
Still, the Cottonwood Fire exposed a few areas where his small fire department needs help. Pearson explained that a lot of the equipment they use is old, and they lack the funding to replace it. According to him, the town fire department is budgeted at around $10,000 per year.
That’s a “drop in the bucket” compared to what they need, Pearson said, and most of that money goes toward things like fuel and equipment maintenance.
Regardless, he said he and his team will keep doing whatever it takes to keep the community safe.
“We've done it for a long time, and we'll just keep doing it, and when we get called, we'll be there one way or the other,” he said.
