1/7/2024 0 Comments Rocky mountain power fireThey ended up in a motel near the neighbourhood of Juniper Ridge. They took a forest service road out of the back of their property and drove to Kamloops.Įven in town they couldn’t get away from fire. They grabbed what they could: a couple of Potts’s favourite guitars and an amp, a laptop and a hard drive, some photos, their two dogs (one of whom was pregnant). The fire crews told the couple that by the time the fire hit a nearby ridge, they’d have to evacuate. Potts and Beharrell had lost power by then, and started moving farm equipment onto the grass away from trees. By the next morning, as firefighters arrived by helicopter and began to strategize, the blaze had already spread. ![]() After four or five hours, BC Wildfire flew planes overhead, observing the fire. From their home, Potts and Beharrell watched with mounting anxiety as the plume became a column and its smoke got blacker, indicating that it was burning more vegetation. ![]() “We thought the fire was significant,” Potts said, “but we figured they’d be able to put it out.” Back home, Beharrell called 911, who transferred her to the BC Wildfire Service, the province’s wildfire-fighting corps. “We just heard a roar, and then the flames started coming toward us,” Potts said. It was so hot, and the wind so fierce, that the fire was already moving very quickly. They raced over to a neighbour’s place a few kilometres away and saw a grass fire spreading. The smoke was pale grey, the plume still small. When they returned home a couple of hours later, they noticed a plume of smoke above the trees to the south of their property. Potts and Beharrell went down to Criss Creek, a half-hour’s drive from their house, to cool off and have a picnic lunch. On June 28, the temperature in Kamloops hit a high of 44 degrees Celsius, almost 20 degrees above average. It can get hot on the ranch in summer, but the summer of 2021 in the south-central part of B.C.’s Interior was mind-bendingly hot. “You learn to drink your coffee black,” Beharrell told me, “because there’s no corner store to run to when you’re out of cream.” They christened the place Seven Sparks Ranch, named in part for a nearby body of water, Sparks Lake. It was undeniably remote-Kamloops was a two-hour round-trip drive along a narrow, sometimes treacherous, gravel road-but that was part of the attraction. They cut and milled trees to build a house, grew their own vegetables, and acquired chickens and a small herd of cattle. Potts and his partner, Jo-Anne Beharrell, an accountant who moonlights as Potts’s manager, wanted to turn the property into an off-grid hobby farm and live self-sufficiently. Mule deer, black bears and bighorn sheep roamed the woods and cliffsides. There were soul-stirring groves of Douglas fir, verdant grasslands, and unspoiled lakes and creeks. ![]() Like the monks, Potts-a 54-year-old country-rock musician and self-described “spiritual guy” who’d previously lived in the Lower Mainland-found the landscape magical. In 2016, Marshall Potts bought 160 acres of land about an hour’s drive from the centre of the universe. ![]() The monks, who visited several times, were reportedly able to identify the spot-a grassy knoll near Deadman River-by its distinctive volcanic topography and through a series of numinous tests, one of which was the ability to start a fire in the area without an ignition source. About 40 years ago, the story goes, several Tibetan Buddhist monks declared that they had discovered the centre of the universe in the mountains north of Kamloops, British Columbia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |