For three days the heat had been building over Santa Barbara like pressure in a sealed room. The sun beat down on red-tile roofs.

Tourists and residents fled to the shade or the beach. Car radiators boiled over on Highway 101.

At night the air barely cooled. At 9 p.m. the thermometer still read 84 degrees; by midnight people were sleeping under sheets, not blankets, waiting for relief that never really came. 

Sense of Foreboding

By Wednesday, June 27, 1990, there was a sense of foreboding in the air, as if the city understood before anyone could say it aloud that something was coming.

By noon, Santa Barbara had broken the 100-degree mark for the third straight day.

Firefighters were taking hourly readings: 98 degrees at 11 a.m. with 18% humidity, 100 degrees at noon and 15% humidity, then 106 degrees by 2 p.m. with an almost unimaginable 8% humidity. 

National Weather Service meteorologist Gary Ryan later put it plainly: “It was like a blast furnace.”

A Red Flag Alert was in effect. Fire departments, the U.S Forest Service, and law enforcement were meeting daily. Patrols were in the foothills. A burn ban was in place. Everyone knew the danger was extreme. 

And still, when the Painted Cave Fire started, Santa Barbara was not fully ready for the particular kind of disaster that was about to unfold. 

Firefighters were already stretched by other blazes.

A 600-acre fire had broken out in Ventura County. In Orange County, the Carbon Canyon Fire had exploded.

In Glendale, an arson fire had drawn engines, helicopters, and — most critically for Santa Barbara — the air tankers that might have mattered in the first moments on San Marcos Pass. 

The worst week of wildfire in California history to date was about to begin, and Santa Barbara was about to become one of its defining chapters. 

Earlier that afternoon, attention had been fixed on the County Transfer Station, where a cardboard fire sent heavy smoke into the sky and triggered a large response.

Firefighters got it under control before 6 p.m., but not before county buildings and sheriff’s vehicles were destroyed. Residents along El Sueno, Sierra Madre, and nearby streets thought they had just watched the day’s emergency come and go. 

Some drifted back toward their yards relieved, believing their homes had been spared. They had no idea that in less than an hour a much more violent fire would tear through the mountains above them and come roaring down toward town. 

Dispatch at 6:02 p.m.

At 6:02 p.m., the dispatch came: “Brush fire reported on Highway 154 at Painted Cave Road.”

At the Transfer Station, firefighters turned north and saw a small wisp of smoke rising above the ridge.

“They’d better get the tankers,” County Fire Captain Tom Franklin said quietly.

But there were no tankers available. 

On San Marcos Pass, Forest Service engine leader Roger Dahlen and firefighter Tim Davis were working on the station generator when word of the fire came in. They raced downslope and reached the scene within minutes. 

Even then, the fire was already showing its character. Winds were running 25 to 40 mph. Flames were 15 to 20 feet high. “It’s really churning,” Dahlen radioed.

Within minutes, what began as a fire of perhaps two acres was expanding rapidly in brush so dry and explosive that the first attack almost instantly became inadequate. 

At 6:24 p.m., a spot fire was reported a half-mile ahead of the main front. In its first 20 minutes, the Painted Cave Fire traveled two miles. Ten minutes later, structures were under threat. 

The men who would soon be most deeply inside that firestorm were the Los Prietos Hot Shots. They were not casual responders, and they were not simply another crew on another call. 

Led by Mark Linane —“Soop” to his crew — the 20-member Los Prietos Hot Shots had built a reputation as one of the toughest and proudest wildland crews in the country.

The culture was hard, unsentimental, and intensely bonded. They expected long hours, absolute discipline, and no whining.

“You take pride in your work,” Soop said. “That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.”

Crew members said wearing the Shot emblem meant something. It meant you had to live up to the shirt. 

They had already been running hard. Earlier in the week they had worked a fire on Santa Cruz Island. Then they were rerouted to Ojai, where they spent the night cutting hand line in steep country and were nearly overrun by a brief firestorm there before escaping into burned ground.

By late Wednesday afternoon, they were exhausted, running on little sleep, and heading back toward Santa Barbara when the Painted Cave Fire dispatch came over the radio. They turned and went straight for it. 

Windy Gap Firestorm

When the Hot Shots reached Windy Gap on Highway 154 at about 6:20 p.m., they met a wall of flame 50 to 70 feet high. Soop instantly understood this was beyond handwork.

He began ordering reinforcements on a scale he had almost never requested before: strike teams of engines, hand crews, bulldozers. 

Then he tried the one thing that still seemed possible — holding the fire west of Highway 154 by burning out along the road. Crew members ran beside the trucks using fusees, road flares, to ignite brush in the gale.

“You didn’t even have to touch the chaparral with the flame,” Ron Bollier said. “All you had to do was wave the fusee across it to get it going.” 

But the fire was already gone. 

It had crested the pass and was pouring downhill like a flood, cutting across the upper forks of Maria Ygnacio Canyon and angling straight for Santa Barbara.

Witnesses described the wind as thundering downhill at more than 50 mph, bending brush, driving waves of smoke and flame, turning the mountainside into a moving wall of red, yellow, purple, and black.

It was beautiful in the way only catastrophe can be beautiful. It was also unstoppable. 

No Time to Waste

In Painted Cave and the Trout Club, residents had no time for abstraction. Dave Hardy was at Santa Barbara City College when his pager flashed the code he and his wife had agreed on: “911,” meaning simply, get home now, a fire is threatening the house.

By the time he reached Rim Road, Chief Robert Keeler’s Bronco was already in his driveway, and people were gathered on the deck looking down at the smoke and flames racing toward town. 

Hardy pulled on his gear and joined the Painted Cave volunteers, who had been created by mountain residents precisely because they understood how exposed these communities were.

What followed was not a dramatic charge into the fire so much as a prolonged and sickening wait: wondering when the wind would turn, and when the fire would come for them. 

Meanwhile, at the Trout Club, Jim Averitt and Rocky Siegel saw the danger almost at once. They had been at the Cielo Store when the San Marcos crew rushed out. By the time they got down toward the club, the flames were already huge.

Their first plan — sound the siren near the mailboxes — failed because the power was out. 

So they improvised. Rocky headed for his wife Mary and their baby daughter, Cassandra, while Jim began warning people.

Children were still outside. Families were still barbecuing. Some had no idea a major fire was moving toward them.

Jim drove back and forth in Rocky’s truck, horn blaring, screaming, “Get out! A fire’s coming! Get out!” 

Emotions at their Peak

What makes these Trout Club scenes so powerful is how ordinary life still was in those first moments. Jill Bates remembered the electricity going out, then the sirens, then the rush to leave.

One son was in shorts, shirtless and barefoot. Another tried to bring a boa constrictor and then a pet rat. She refused both. With no time to decide what to bring or not bring, all that mattered was getting out of the house, into their car and as far as they could from the flames. 

Rocky, after getting his family out, climbed into Brush 1, the small volunteer fire truck stationed at his house, and joined Steve Moore to try to hold the ridge above the Trout Club.

The two men spent hours shuttling up and down Old San Marcos, knocking down every spot fire and flare-up they could reach before it could slip over the top. 

Rocky knew exactly what was at stake.

“If the fire had gotten over us and down into the canyon, the Trout Club would have cooked,” he said. “You just couldn’t tell what it was going to do. The wind was so erratic.” 

That combination of nerve, local knowledge, and improvisation is part of what gave Painted Cave and the Trout Club communities their own culture of survival.

These were not passive neighborhoods waiting for rescue. They were mountain communities that had organized volunteer departments, laid in hose, stored water, and thought about fire in daily life.

Yet the Painted Cave Fire was so violent that even that preparation had limits. Rocky and Steve could hold what crossed the ridge for a while. They could not control the entire mountain.

Later, after dark, when the fire began moving through the lower parts of the Trout Club and torching homes, both men could only watch from above, hearing propane tanks blow and seeing flames move from understory to crowns to houses. 

Warning the Communtiy

Elsewhere, Jim Averitt, after warning residents, raced to Laurel Springs Ranch, where 50 children between 12 and 14 were eating dinner. Smoke was so thick no one could tell where the fire was going, only that it was big and moving fast.

“We’ve got to get the kids out of here,” Jim told camp director David Hodges and assistant Deborah Bernal. 

Within an hour, the children were loaded into vans and relocated to Santa Ynez High School. It was one of the quieter rescues of the night, and one of the most consequential. 

On the Edge of Disaster

Down on Highway 154, the Hot Shots were now in one of the most dangerous episodes of the fire. Bollier and his crew came upon two civilian vehicles stopped in smoke: a pickup and a Volkswagen.

The drivers were too frightened to continue. Bollier ordered them to follow his truck and not let him out of their sight. 

But the fire gained on them almost immediately. When he realized they would not make it through, he had his crew hand out water and pup tents to the trapped civilians. One Hot Shot climbed into the VW with the driver because she looked like she might go into shock. 

The fire then overran them. Flames hit the windshield and mushroomed over it. Bollier drove blind, weaving from one side of the road to the other, trying to find survivable space as fire came at them from both Maria Ygnacio Canyon and the slope across the road.

At one point, the truck stalled. Crew members later said there was no time to panic. 

There was only the question of what to do next, every second, while the fire enveloped them. The pickup behind them vanished in flame.

The heat was so severe that the truck’s lights and reflectors melted off, gear on top ignited, and the steering wheel became almost too hot to hold.

They endured direct fire for more than five minutes. Afterwards, they climbed out, still alive, to put out flames on their own truck and then on the pickup behind them. 

Civilian Trapped Nearby

One of the civilians, Sherri Harker, later said she thought her tires would melt and the car would explode.

“The firefighters were beautiful,” she said.

It is a small sentence, but it captures a truth the larger statistics often bury: that in the middle of chaos, terror narrows down to whoever is beside you helping you stay alive. 

By then the fire had crossed Highway 154 and was dropping into the neighborhoods below. In San Antonio Canyon and around Via Los Santos, firefighters entered a world of triage.

Whole blocks were burning. “Every house on the entire block was burning,” Wes Preston remembered.

Crews would arrive at one home, judge whether it could still be saved, and either tear into it — ripping off porches, knocking away shingles, hosing exposed walls — or abandon it if the interior was already involved. 

Then the radio would erupt with new cries for help somewhere else. In this kind of fire, no response feels adequate because there are too many emergencies for any one action to feel sufficient. 

Residents begged firefighters not to leave. Others watched in disbelief as engines drove past homes that were already lost to reach ones that might still be saved, or to respond to reports of trapped people.

Later, some were furious. Curtis Vincent, the Forest Service veteran who became one of the incident commanders, understood that anger. 

But he also knew what the crews were facing. At a certain point, he said, lives became more important than houses.

That is one of the central emotional fractures of a fire like Painted Cave: firefighters are doing the most important work of their lives, and many residents still experience them, understandably, as absent. 

The imagery from those neighborhoods remains almost unbearable. Two men in business suits were seen on rooftops tearing off shingles and saving friends’ houses while their own homes across the street burned.

When the immediate danger passed, they sat on the lawn with cold beers and looked at the red silhouettes of what had been theirs. 

Sheila Ehrhardt, watching from El Sueno, said it was like a nuclear bomb, then like a massive freight train, then suddenly dead still except for crackling flames.

Susan Frame, trapped in traffic on Modoc Road with her twin 4-year-olds, thought she and the children might “blow up right here” as explosions went off and flames moved toward the car.

Navy veteran Al Todd said the fire crossing Cathedral Oaks looked like a napalm attack in Vietnam. The comparisons people reached for were all war. 

Ordinary language was not enough. 

A Tragic Moment

And in the middle of all this, there was death. Andrea Gurka, alone at her home in the hills, tried to escape on foot as the fire descended. The next day her body was found a few hundred yards from the house.

Investigators believed she had sought a low area, hoping the fire would pass over. Instead, the canyon acted like a chimney, funneling heat and flame directly through the place where she had taken refuge. Her death gives the fire a terrible point of stillness. 

So many people escaped by minutes or seconds. She did not. 

By midnight, cooler air helped blunt the fire’s forward violence in the city, but the damage was done. At dawn, survivors walked back into a changed world.

Laura Hout Ryan, seeing her parents’ place, described a chimney standing alone “like a gravestone,” with the shell of a refrigerator and melted car windows marking where rooms used to be. 

Steve Kurstin and Marina Alzugaray climbed Old San Marcos Road and looked out over a deadly, barren landscape. Their rented home was gone.

“For renters like us,” Steve said, “we’re in the wind.”

It is one of the cruel social truths of wildfire: loss is not equal, and vulnerability does not end when the flames do. 

Returning to the Community

For Rocky and Steve, the morning return to the Trout Club was its own form of shock. Rocky expected his house to be gone. Instead, he found it still there while many of his friends’ homes had burned.

Relief and grief arrived together. They went immediately to work again, foaming houses, checking interiors, and trying to hold what remained as the fire continued to move. Even survival did not end the labor. 

The firefighters carried their own aftermath. House fires are filthy, chemical burns on the lungs at a scale no training can make ordinary.

Members of the Hot Shots talked openly about coughing all summer, about colds turning into bronchitis, about doctors warning them their lungs looked like those of heavy smokers. 

Soop admitted he never followed through on a full pulmonary test because he was afraid to know how much function had been lost. That fear says something important about Hot Shot culture too.

It is not just toughness in the fireline sense. It is a culture that absorbs punishment, often quietly, because the job has always demanded more from the body than the body can safely give. 

One of the fire’s lingering shadows was Mark Moore, the medic from Torrance who had helped during Painted Cave after only recently joining the San Marcos Station to gain fire experience.

Weeks later, on another fire, he fell on steep ground, was hospitalized, appeared to improve, then died of an aneurysm. For those who worked beside him, it felt like one more delayed casualty from a season that had already taken too much. 

The Fire’s End

The Painted Cave Fire officially ended on July 2, 1990. But that date only marks the end of active burning. It does not mark the end of the story.

Fires like this continue in memory, in damaged lungs, in photographs of foundations and chimneys, in the reflexive fear residents feel on hot windy evenings years later.

Jim Averitt later wrote a song about the fire, intending to perform it at a benefit concert. When he got on stage, he found he could not sing it. The story was still too close. 

“Even now,” Jim says, “when I begin to talk about the fire, I get tears in my eyes.”

That may be the truest final measure of the Painted Cave Fire. It was not only a disaster of acres, structures, wind, and flame — 500 homes lost in the blink of an eye.

It was a disaster that encompassed so many feelings — of panic, courage, helplessness, improvisation, loyalty, exhaustion, and grief. 

It stripped life down to immediacies: who got warned, who stayed calm, who drove back for someone else, who held the ridge, who kept moving when the fire was already on them, who came home to a chimney and ash, who could not quite bring themselves to speak or sing about it afterward. 

Out of the Trout Club….

Panic Struck like pain.
Believe it’s happening,
Move as fast as you can
To try to save another man.
An old lady’s eyes jumping from inside
I have a car, we have to make it
through the flames.
Panic struck like pain.
Oh, what will remain?
Out of the Trout Club.