A Wildfire Threatened Squamish. Your Town Could Be Next

Just before 4 p.m. on June 9, three Squamish trail runners were on their way up a steep trail at the north end of town, just south of DeBeck’s Hill. One of the men had missed a recent community race, but he wanted to see how he’d do against the records set by that race and challenged two friends to join him. The trio set off up the popular trail, which winds up the side of a thickly forested hillside above this mountain town on B.C.’s south coast.

Ten minutes in — about 125 metres up — the runners spotted flames against a southwest-facing cliff. The fire was only about three square metres, being fed by dried moss on a boulder, and the flames had already jumped to the forest floor. While one runner called 911, the other two tried stamping out embers.

But the fire kept spreading, and one runner sprinted back down to the trailhead at Tantalus Road, searching for help and tools.

By then, smoke was rising above the trees and was visible from the highway. Residents and drivers took notice, and the emergency calls rolled in. Going door to door, the runner found a fire extinguisher and a backpack water cooler and sent those back up the trail.

The “initial attack crew” arrived at the trailhead within 15 minutes, according to the runner, whom The Tyee has agreed to quote anonymously because of fear of online harassment. But by the time the runner reached the fire, it had already ignited nearby trees and a trail bridge. It had become unmanageable. The runner said he was shocked at the speed of its growth.

“There was no smoke when we first got there, just flames — it couldn't have been started more than a few minutes before we found it, and still, we couldn't put it out.”

The fire — named the Dryden Creek fire — would grow to nearly 60 hectares, prompt evacuation alerts and take 11 days to proclaim under control. It was one of nearly 400 wildfires the province had already responded to this year, collectively consuming more than 600,000 hectares. Though it was reported early and resourced quickly, the fire offered a sober glimpse of how fast B.C.'s coastal rainforests can burn — even early in the season. It also was a chance to see what it was like for this town of over 23,000 to be threatened by, and respond to, the threat of a wildfire.

Monday, June 9: ‘Did you know the fire is right above your house?’

At 4:15 p.m., Simon Thomson, a ski guide and business owner who lives on east Depot Road at the base of DeBeck’s Hill, got a call from a friend who’d seen the fire from the highway.

“Hey, did you know the fire is right above your house?” the friend asked.

He biked out to the road for a better view.

“There was smoke billowing up. You could tell it was coming this way,” he said, noting the southerly winds that often kick up in the afternoon in the Sea-to-Sky corridor.

At first, Thomson wasn’t overly concerned and he expected a rapid response from emergency services because of the fire’s location. Still, he made a quick call to a local rental store asking it to stay open so he could grab pumps and hoses. His wife began packing essentials and important documents.

“When you live in a forest, you have to be prepared,” he told me.

“After 29 years, I don’t make any assumptions with wildfire,” said Marc Simpson, a response officer and zone wildfire co-ordination officer with BC Wildfire Service, or BCWS. He told me a fire’s behaviour can change within an hour, and the steep slope, southwest aspect and gusting wind created ideal fire-spreading conditions. BCWS and the District of Squamish declared the fire out of control that night.

That evening, two helicopters took turns dropping water on the fire. An air tanker dropped fire retardant to try to protect the houses and the communications tower atop the hill. Twenty BCWS firefighters joined the initial four-person response team on the ground, running hoses to the edges of the fire and removing fuel sources like dead trees and underbrush.

Jillian A. Brown, a professional photographer, had seen the smoke while walking her dog. She grabbed her cameras and went to the trailhead and joined a crowd of neighbours who had gathered by the fire trucks. Some were connected to the action through friends working in aviation or wildfire crews. Others simply wanted to be together during a moment of uncertainty.

“They were just making small talk, like, ‘How long have you been in Squamish? Why did you move here?’” Brown said. “It was amazing. It was such a community moment.”

By 8:30 p.m., the smoke had taken on a yellowish-orange glow in the fading light.

“It looked a lot more intimidating then,” she said.

Back on his property, Thomson was growing uneasy. With friends, he had removed any flammable items from his yard — pallets, firewood, propane — and set up hoses, pulling water from a nearby creek, to soak surrounding trees. He showed me a photo from that night, of a tree that had spontaneously ignited — a phenomenon called “candling” — just 80 metres from his house. At 10:50 p.m., the District of Squamish issued evacuation alerts for properties at the base of the hill and directly to the south, warning residents to prepare to leave.

Tuesday, June 10: ‘The fire was coming down the hill’

The next morning, Tuesday, June 10, the sky above the highway was dramatic. Smoke chugged up out of the woods and over the highway. Traffic had been cut down to one lane going north. A tightly choreographed ballet of three helicopters took turns dropping water on the fire, then filling up in nearby lakes and rivers — some in intervals of less than two minutes. The fire had grown to five hectares and was spreading north toward Alice Lake Provincial Park, which runs along the northern boundary of Squamish. By 11 a.m. the wind had picked up, gusting to 30 kilometres per hour through the afternoon. While that wind improved helicopter visibility, it also fuelled the fire’s growth. The district declared a local state of emergency and a fire ban.

Brown had gotten permission from the owners of the MTN Fun Basecamp campground to document the efforts on their property, which sits just north of Thomson’s home. There was no evacuation order yet, but many of the guests and long-term residents had already left voluntarily. She described owners, staff and the remaining campers frantically pulling trailers away from walls of moss that had lit up because of flying embers and running hoses to soak the more permanent structures.

“We were pretty scared, because the fire was coming down the hill,” said Cam Manson, the campground manager.

FireSmart BC representatives were soon on site, helping cover unmovable items with tarps to protect them from ash and remove fuels from vulnerable areas. FireSmart BC is a provincial program to help homeowners understand what they need to do to fireproof their homes and properties, such as removing flammable vegetation from the sides of homes. The campground then became the staging zone for the ground response, filling with firefighters from across the province.

Early on, the steep terrain made access difficult for ground crews.

“It’s a big safety concern for our workers,” said Simpson. “Large four-foot-diameter fir trees that have now burned and are exposed to wind, steep rolling slopes. Vegetation around rocks that have been burned, loosening them up.”

That’s why fire suppression from the air was the initial defence.

Heinz Blatter is a helicopter pilot with 15 years of experience fighting fires in B.C. He works for Black Tusk Helicopter, which had been contracted by BCWS to help fight the Dryden Creek fire. Blatter said that for him, this fire was “middle of the road” for difficulty. Though there were advantages, like a nearby airbase and many water sources, there were also challenges: the strong winds and the gymnastics required to avoid the buoyed communication line that ran up the hill to the radio tower.

Blatter flies the K-Max, a single-seat helicopter with two intermeshed rotors developed specifically to manage exceptionally heavy loads of up to 6,000 pounds (a weight equivalent to over 600 gallons of water). He told me he flew between 100 and 180 water loads to the fire each day — depending on whether he filled up in the rivers or nearby lakes.

That night, Squamish residents — families, dog walkers and others who had driven up to see for themselves — gathered at the west side of the junction of the highway and Depot Road in what could have been mistaken for a slightly more solemn fireworks block party.

There was a thick orange glow on the cliffs, where embers and smoke danced behind silhouetted trees. Occasionally, a new tree would candle and illuminate another section of terrain around it. The gullies looked as though they were full of molten lava. Homeowners were noting details of the fire’s movement, trying to predict whether they could finally get some sleep.

“It won't cross the highway,” one person said confidently, perhaps unaware that in most fires, it is travelling embers that ignite the houses, not the flames themselves. In Kelowna in 2023, embers were proven to have jumped over Okanagan Lake; that fire destroyed over 300 structures and became a case study on the urban-wildland interface and what could be done to better protect homes.

Though not under an evacuation order, many residents who lived near the highway started watering their roofs and properties, a technique that has been proven to save structures in other wildfires. Suddenly, a sound like crackling thunder travelled down the hill as enormous trees and rocks came loose and fell down the cliffs. The crowd murmured about what Wednesday would bring, with higher winds in the forecast.

Wednesday, June 11: ‘There wasn’t a lot of sleep this week’

Each day, there was a 50-person meeting in the Emergency Operations Center, hosted at the Squamish firehall, including members of the Squamish Nation, BC Emergency Health Services, the RCMP, BCWS and other community stakeholders.

“They all provide input and need the information and direction to plan each day. It's a lot to organize,” Aaron Foote, Squamish’s fire chief, told me. Because the fire was in his jurisdiction, he led the operation, with BCWS in the supporting role — different from many other wildfires in the province. Both Foote and Simpson, along with some of the BCWS firefighters who fought the Dryden Creek blaze, also live in Squamish — and they knew what could happen. In the wildfire that ravaged Kelowna in 2023, another fire that fell within a municipality and was also jointly managed, 13 of the firefighters lost their own homes.

“There wasn't a lot of sleep this week,” Foote, who also lived near the evacuation alert zone, told me. “There are a number of us with local ties who feel it.”

On Wednesday, the fire doubled in size again. The response team installed a water basin next to the BC Hydro tower at the top of the hill to feed hoses, run down by ground crews. Air tankers dropped more fire retardant in the afternoon. With only one road in and a haze of smoke across it, BCWS recommended that Alice Lake Provincial Park evacuate its campground. The Squamish Nation also elected to remove items from the park’s longhouse and cancelled events in town out of respect.

By Saturday, even though the fire was still growing, the conditions for its management were improving — a chance of rain in the forecast and relative humidity climbing. The firefighters connected a five-kilometre-long perimeter around the fire, which was at that point 59.5 hectares.

I met Simpson at the end of Tantalus Road, where he and Foote were checking on the crews’ progress. A delivery car showed up with a high stack of pizza boxes for the firefighters. (Though BCWS is not supposed to accept donations, many in the community wouldn’t take no for an answer, leaving them meals, treats and supportive signage.)

We drove to the top of DeBeck’s Hill. The dirt access road to the hilltop had been levelled earlier in the week by a logging outfit hired by BCWS, allowing a logging truck with a 2,500-gallon tank to drive all the way up to shuttle water from the lake to the basin.

That day, ground crews had also run hoses, connected by a dozen pumps, to push water to the summit of the hill — an elevation gain of 280 metres.

One of the unexpected advantages of the fire’s location was the network of mountain biking trails already carved into the terrain — saving time and energy the ground crews would usually spend cutting trails.

Around 2:30 p.m., Simpson and I hiked down a biking trail to the edge of the fire. A red-stained barrier of fire retardant covered the trees and forest floor like badly applied spray paint, separating the charred black soil and lush greens. He pointed to a rock outcrop on the trail he said had also likely helped stop the fire.

He reached down to put his hands in the soil. Most of the actual firefighting is done by the ground crews, who dig deep into the burned soil and brush, seeking out embers that might be smouldering deep beneath the surface of the deep, loamy, second-generation forest floor, just waiting for more oxygen to ignite again. The final test is whether a human hand can safely touch it.

It's the same as a campfire, he told me, where a bucket of water can kill the flames, but the embers can keep smouldering beneath the surface. These can persist in dry conditions for years, like in the drought that northwest B.C. has endured over the last few years. Fort St. John has dealt with this reality: a wildfire has overwintered for two years now, staying active well below a surface layer of snow and sub-zero temperatures, only to erupt into flames in the summer. Last year, over 80 fires overwintered from 2023 — posing new challenges for the BC Wildfire Service.

That afternoon, the District of Squamish announced that the Dryden Creek fire was being held.

Learning from the fire drill

Over the past two decades, forest fires have increasingly attracted worldwide media attention because of their growing intensity, and the devastating impact on lives and property has put the insurance industry on edge and prompted communities and organizations to file lawsuits against oil and gas companies for contributing to the conditions that exacerbate climate change and lead to more severe national disasters.

In his 2023 book Fire Weather, author John Vaillant described the 2016 wildfire that decimated Fort McMurray, explaining how fire behaviour has altered due to climate change and how the urban relationship to wildlands, property setbacks, building materials and fire suppression has changed over time, making our communities less resilient. The book could well be required reading for anyone living near a forest or even in a city, as Vaillant highlighted in an article last fall, comparing Vancouver's fire conditions to the wildfire that devastated entire neighbourhoods of Los Angeles in 2024. He argued luck may be the only difference.

“There is a lot of work to do to build public understanding of how to manage fire,” said Klay Tindall, the general manager of Líl̓wat Forestry Ventures, which operates from the Líl̓wat Nation and came to support the response to the Dryden Creek fire.

Tindall described how government fire policy shifted over the last century — from suppressing all fires, including cultural burns and management that clears underbrush and thins forests, to only recently starting to recognize fire ecology and the importance of Indigenous-led fire practices.

In Mount Currie, just over an hour north of Squamish, Tindall’s operation is helping reintroduce culturally important plants to the mountain forest, like huckleberries, through strategic burns managed in cool, wet shoulder seasons. They do this by thinning younger trees in the understorey and removing some of the thick layers of fuels, like dead trees and thick underbrush left over from logging practices and fire suppression.

But on provincial land, like Alice Lake Provincial Park, Tindall said, regulations are still too rigid.

“We need to have more flexibility. Sometimes a bit of smoke in November might not be the worst thing versus the amount of smoke you'd see in a forest fire in July or August.”

The Dryden Creek fire, now under control, could be viewed as a beneficial fire in some ways, thanks to the manageable winds, high relative humidity, quick response and available resources: it did clear fuel and could ultimately be good for the forest's health.

But differentiating between a beneficial fire and a devastating one is difficult.

Simpson told me this fire’s downsides still far outweigh the benefits. There’s the cost to both the province and the municipality, and the slope instability above the campground that led to an evacuation order.

According to BCWS, 85 people were deployed to fight the fire from across the province (this number does not include Squamish Nation, Squamish Fire Rescue and the District of Squamish). BCWS estimated that the helicopters dropped 70,000 gallons, the truck carried 126,000 gallons of water to the summit of DeBeck’s Hill, and the air tankers dropped 5,000 gallons of retardant on the fire by the time it was held on June 17.

The cost to the province will be over $1 million by the time all the operations to contain the fire are complete.

The Squamish fire was quickly contained, said Simpson, thanks in part to BCWS helping to build out structural systems, deployment training and other resources in municipal fire departments like Squamish’s.

But Simpson worries residents on the coast might get the wrong message. Many of the experts I spoke to told me the same conditions and resources that were thrown at Squamish’s Dryden Creek fire may not be available for a similar fire in six weeks.

“We kind of live in this naive bubble,” said Lori Daniels, a forestry professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in coastal wildfires.

Twenty years ago, at the beginning of her career, wildfires were not the greatest threat in the temperate coastal rainforests, Daniels said. But that changed in 2015, when the Coastal Fire Centre started seeing more impactful fires. Since then, the area has continued to break records.

To her, this year looks too much like 2023 — the last record-breaking year for fire weather conditions across B.C.

“The ecosystems are functioning well outside their normal ranges,” she said.

Mountain snowpacks are often not as deep, meaning less moisture in the mountain system. Much of the thick second-growth forests and the loamy, lush forest floor that is common in B.C.’s coastal forests are less natural than we imagine, Daniels told me.

“They're an unnatural artifact of our very successful fire suppression and our removal of Indigenous fire stewardship that used to maintain much more diverse landscapes,” she said.

Now, much of that loamy forest floor humus and thick underbrush turns to dust and kindling each summer as we experience hotter weather that sucks the moisture out of forests.

Combine those conditions with fire suppression and declining snowpacks with warmer spring conditions, and “we have crossed the tipping point where climate and the conditions of the forest have come to this nexus that is creating fire weather and fire conditions,” Daniels said.

Daniels said there is more work to be done: all B.C. residents should be preparing their properties using FireSmart BC as a resource. Municipalities should be paying attention to research on the risk of building houses close to the forest, and better management of the flammable underbrush should be considered in our dense, second-growth forests. Because right now, “we have all of the ingredients for there to be a very consequential fire,” she warned.

Last week, some of the bike trails near Alice Lake reopened, and much of the provincial park is again accessible. Parts of the campground remain under an evacuation order, and although the evacuation alerts for the properties south of the fire have been rescinded, Thomson’s home and others at the base of the hill remain under alert.

Thomson and his neighbours are still listening to crashing trees as ground crews fall danger trees in the forest above. He described the “emotional comedown” his family and his neighbourhood are feeling as they process the adrenalin of being alert and in action for so many days and nights. For some, it has led to lethargy and brain fog. But he’s not soon going to forget the support he felt.

“You all come together for something that's bigger than you, that you can’t really control. But the help you can offer to people in times of crisis — it's the one thing you can do.” He told me he’s grateful for the rain scheduled in the week ahead.

Brown saw this as a kind of fire drill for what she needs to have prepared if another fire happens — ready to pack keepsakes, documents, a full tank of gas and a go bag for her dog. In the past few months, she has also been watching as family members have been evacuated because of fires in Alberta, and under evacuation alert in northern Ontario.

“Many of the places I love have been burned,” she told me. “It’s such a big reminder to cherish not just our friends, family and community but the wild place around us.”