One year ago, Dale Hagemeyer’s day started with a bowl of cereal.
He looked out the window of his Pine Valley home and saw charred trees in the distance. They seemed far removed from his kitchen table. And for a moment, he thought his small mountain community in southwest Utah had dodged a bullet.
But that night, June 20, 2025, the wind shifted, and the Forsyth Fire roared into his neighborhood.
“It came shooting through here to the east and took out 13 homes — just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,” Hagemeyer recalled. “And this is one of them.”
The retired businessman was busy elsewhere that night, fighting the flames as part of Pine Valley’s volunteer fire department. When he returned the next day, the house where he and his wife had lived for a decade had become a smoldering crater, filled with the remains of just about everything they owned.
The Forsyth Fire burned nearly 16,000 acres in the mountains north of St. George, and left its mark on Pine Valley, population 355.
“Either we're just going to sell this charred piece of dirt and go someplace else, or we're going to rebuild,” he said. “We just decided, where else would we go? We like it here.”
But the nearly year-long road to recovery has been excruciating.
Fanned by ferocious winds, the fire burned hot enough to crack the foundation of Hagemeyer’s old house. So, the concrete footings needed to be ripped out before the rebuild could start. After replacing the foundation, a flood from the fire’s burn scar slathered his new basement with an 18-inch layer of sludge, which had to be vacuumed out with a specialized pump.
Simply getting good help with the basic aspects of construction in such a remote area has been a challenge.
“I’ll be honest with you, it's incredibly painful, because people don't show up when they say they'll show up,” Hagemeyer said as he leaned on a dishwasher box in his half-finished kitchen. “Every step along the way — the painting, there's something that will go wrong. The plumbing, there's something that will go wrong.”
Some of his neighbors have had similar problems, he said, and other rebuilds are just now getting started.
As Utah expands further into undeveloped areas and climate change supercharges the dry, hot, windy weather that fuels wildfires, disasters like the Forsyth Fire will likely become more common.
And when an inferno comes to town, it leaves more than physical damage.
“It was really hard on people,” Pine Valley Fire Chief Robert Hardy said. “PTSD is a very real beast.”
One part of that fateful night stuck with him most. It was when he sent two of his crew members toward the fire to keep it from jumping a road.
“When I saw them get wrapped into this cloud of smoke and flame, and they just disappeared, I thought, ‘Man, I really hope I see those guys again,’” Hardy said. “I'm not really trained for that. I'm not a firefighter, I'm a retired pharmacist.”
It wasn’t until a few days after the incident that Hardy realized he was experiencing post-traumatic stress.
Now, nearly a year later, he said it feels good to see signs of recovery around town. Green grass once again carpets the hills behind the fire station, and Hardy said the U.S. Forest Service has planted tree seedlings on the singed slopes in the distance.
“After the fire, this was all scorched black,” he said, motioning across the landscape. “It's amazing how quickly it's come back.”
The trauma he and his crew experienced is healing, too.
Just a few months before the fire, the department got a $16,000 state grant to cover one year of support from a mental resilience program for first responders. Crew members and their families were able to meet with counselors within days of the fire and have continued to do so.
Having that help in place has been vital, Hardy said.
“By taking these stressful, traumatic instances in your life and dealing with them in a healthy, proper way, you can actually experience growth,” he said. “I've seen that happen with our department. Most people are probably stronger this year than they were last year at this time.”
After seeing the mental health program’s positive impact, Pine Valley leaders voted to continue funding it through at least 2026.
There are signs of recovery at Dale Hagemeyer’s place, too.
His new house may not have a kitchen sink or all of its lights yet, but he said it’s just a few finishing touches away from feeling like home again.
Through the windows in his mostly bare living room, Hagemeyer looked out at the forest beyond his backyard, now peppered with black matchstick trees.
This isolated mountain setting is what drew him and his wife to Pine Valley — and kept them here through the trials of the past year. He understands that deciding to stay in a place like this comes with risk.
“That's why you don't hear me saying, ‘Woe is me,’” he said. “If you live next to the forest, the forest may rise up. And if the forest rises up, as we've seen, there's nothing you can do about it.”
Still, he’s trying to do what he can to be ready, like building his new home with more fire-resistant materials. And after roughly 10 months of work, he finally expects to move back in within a couple of weeks.
