Drinking coffee at around 5 a.m., Adam Guyton was looking east from his Harris North house and awaiting the sunrise when he saw a glow in the Boise Foothills.
But it was too early to be the sun.
Igniting sometime in the middle of the night, the Valley Fire started in the hills north of Lucky Peak Reservoir and quickly torched wide swaths of grassland, tearing west toward some of the newest neighborhoods in Southeast Boise, including Guyton’s. By midafternoon, the blaze had grown to 4,000 acres, threatening neighborhoods and leading to different levels of evacuation orders.
“As the sun came up, we could see the flames cresting over the Foothills,” Guyton told the Idaho Statesman.
Neighbors started texting each other, wondering what to do. Guyton said he called in the fire to authorities, turned his sprinklers on and waited.
Later that morning, Boise police officers arrived on his street, which borders the Boise River Wildlife Management Area. At around noon, police told residents over a loudspeaker to evacuate, saying they should leave in five minutes, Guyton said.
“We’ve got five minutes? What do we grab?” Guyton remembered thinking. He threw a couple of bikes and his skis into his truck, loaded up with his wife and their dog, and left. As they drove out, the blaze was only 100 yards or so from the homes to the east of their neighborhood.
‘This is apocalyptic’
At around 1:30 p.m., residents of Harris Ranch West were out enjoying a warm Friday in early fall under a cloudless sky. Bicyclists pedaled east toward Lucky Peak, and other locals were out to lunch or on an afternoon stroll.
But just a mile north in the hills above their homes was a starkly different scene: Flames tore down the side of a hill toward houses perched above the city. The flames traveled tens of feet in seconds in the afternoon breeze.
As the flames topped the hills and headed toward homes, residents watched from below as crews worked to contain the fire, blocking it from reaching neighborhoods by “backburning,” or setting smaller fires near structures to create buffer zones, according to residents who watched them work.
Such backburns mean that a wildfire has no more fuel when it reaches that area.
Planes circled above, diving and dropping plumes of pink dust — fire retardant — on the steep slopes, while helicopters ferried large buckets of water from the Boise River. Smoke colored gray, white and ochre billowed above the hills, and the line of fire rippled through the brown grass like water spilling across a table: yellow where it hadn’t burned, black where it had.
The extent of the burn ranged as far north in the hills as was visible from the valley.
Boiseans pulled over on the side of the road to watch the conflagration, looking up at the hills with binoculars and cameras.
“This is apocalyptic,” said Shaylee Healy, standing outside her home in Harris Ranch West. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
She’d just come back from her parents’ house, which is in a development farther east and closer to the fire’s origin. They were out of town, so she stopped by to pick up essentials for them in case the wildfire entered the neighborhood, she said.
“What’s the notification system?” she wondered aloud. “When will they tell us to put stuff in your car, that we should be ready to leave?”
At around 1:40 p.m., the Boise Fire Department sent out a cellphone alert asking residents to avoid the Foothills. Shortly after 2 p.m., Bogus Basin Mountain Recreation Area canceled youth cycling championships set for this weekend.
As of 5 p.m., no structures were known to have burned, according to a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, a testament to the fire crews.
But in the wind, the flames drew within feet of residences, sometimes as their occupants watched.
‘Stay for the Views’
On the road up to Harris North, piles of blackened ash lined the gutters. A sign advertising the new development, made by Boise Hunter Homes, read: “Come for the Homes … Stay for the Views.”
Chelsi Baldwin lives in a house along the back side of Harris North. Below her backyard, the beginnings of the Homestead Trail stretches into the Foothills.
After driving east at around 10:15 a.m. Friday morning to see the fire’s progress, she came home less than an hour later to watch flames sweep toward her home. As a backhoe up on the hillside tried to dig a trench to stop the fire in its path, she watched flames jump past it.
Forty feet below her backyard is an emergency access road, where she said fire crews started a blaze in an effort to keep the wildfire at bay. Firefighters walked through her backyard on their way to the fire line. Within 30 minutes, the whole hillside had gone up in flames, she told the Statesman.
But the crews’ efforts worked: The Valley Fire hit the backburn area and went up to the access road, but no farther.
Remembering the Table Rock Fire in 2015, which burned 37 acres, Baldwin said she knew the grasslands would all ignite.
“We knew the whole thing was gonna go,” she said.
She praised the work of the firefighters, who were able to keep the flames out of several neighborhoods.
A few blocks northwest, Guyton returned home at around 3 p.m. The hillside across the street from his house — yards from his front door — had burned all the way up to the road. Fire crews had set smaller blazes there to help keep it from crossing the road, where it would have been in front yards.
“These firefighters are amazing,” he said, having watched them work that morning. “That probably saved us.”
He added: “I feel like we got lucky.”
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