It was 7:30 in the morning on November 8, 2018, and the sky was dark. Embers as long as five or six inches were falling around Mark Thorp’s home in the small Northern California town of Paradise. A former firefighter, Thorp knew what the glowing debris meant—the flames were close.
As he loaded a go bag containing important family documents, photographs, and other irreplaceable items into his van, he fielded calls from his two places of employment: the Paradise Ridge Chamber of Commerce, where he is a business advocate, and the Gold Nugget Museum, where he is the executive director. A maintenance man at the Gold Nugget, Bob, wanted to know what to do with the museum’s 25,000 items. There were Henry rifles—dating back to the 1800s—old vehicles, and Indigenous grinding pots. Officially opened in 1981, the museum had been collecting items related to life on “the Ridge” (as locals call the region) since 1965.
Thorp wasn’t too worried about the artifacts, believing the blaze would be stopped, as all the previous flare-ups on the Ridge in recent years had been. “We knew how prone we were to a [large-scale] wildfire in this case but never treated it as though it was a real thing,” he says.
Nevertheless, Thorp headed out of town, stopping by the chamber of commerce to retrieve the main server. As Thorp waited in traffic, Bob called again.
