The Nuns Canyon Fire of 1964

By Tracy Salcedo

The parallels are startling.

Both wildland fires began in the same cleft in the Mayacamas Mountains and would bear the name of the road that runs through it: Nuns Canyon in 1964, simply Nuns in 2017. The spark originated with PG&E power lines. Winds approaching hurricane force whipped the sparks into infernos. Both were part of a complex of fires within Sonoma County and beyond fed by an abundance of tinder-dry fuels toasting in the heat of a late summer sun. Even the burn scars overlap — and overlap older burn scars as well.

The Mayacamas are mountains that burn regularly, according to data assembled by historical ecologist Arthur Dawson of Glen Ellen. His research for CalFire documents a cycle of fire and regeneration that spans roughly 40 to 50 years, with fires occurring in 1923, 1964, and 2017. Two of those fires resulted in significant loss of property in the Sonoma Valley: Boyes Springs was leveled in 1923, and hundreds of homes were lost in Kenwood and Glen Ellen in 2017.

Each of the historic firestorms also generated stories of bravery and fortitude. Invariably, in any current gathering of Sonoma Valley residents, someone brings up the 2017 fires. Newspapers capture the action in real time and then serve as an archive. The Santa Rosa Press Democrat ran multiple stories about the 1964 Nuns Canyon fire siege, as well as the battle against the bigger and better known Hanly Fire, precursor to 2017’s devastating Tubbs Fire. “Kenwood Fire Explodes” reads one headline, and the story includes the observation of a reporter forced to flee 50-foot flames outside Agua Caliente. “Oh My God!” the reporter reported. “It’s right here. We got to go right now!” Interestingly, coverage included an image of the historic Tubbs mansion, which was destroyed in the Hanly Fire.

The Kenwood Press didn’t exist in 1964, but in 1998 the paper ran a story about the memories of firefighter Fred Sand, who fought the Nuns Canyon blaze. When the fire broke out on Sept. 19, Sand said, it first blew north and east out of Nuns Canyon toward Adobe Canyon and Sugarloaf. The next day the wind shifted and intensified, blowing the fire south toward the city of Sonoma. “Propelled by the strong winds, the Nuns Canyon fire burned for three days and consumed more than 10,000 acres before being extinguished by ‘water bombs’ behind what is now Sonoma Cinemas,” the article states. Even with the range and speed of the fire, however, Sand remembers few evacuations. 'It wasn’t populated up there like it is now,' he says. 'Now it would be a disaster.'

And sometimes, a storyteller sets down words in a booklet or letter, capturing more intimately the intensity of the experience of surviving a wildfire. Such a letter recently landed in my inbox, detailing the Nuns Canyon firefight in the 1964 Nuns Canyon in one man’s extraordinary voice.

From Hammermark House

In the immediate wake of the Nuns Canyon Fire, Bob Gilmore was concerned about family. “Some of you, by phone, have learned some scant details of what’s been going on here,” he wrote in a letter dated Sept. 23, 1964; “[and some of you] may have been upset by wild rumors and reports on the radio and TV and in the papers. Here’s what did happen .…” In the next five pages, Gilmore describes how he and his neighbors fought and survived the blaze.

When the fire started on Saturday, as Sand observed, Gilmore writes that it went north and away from his property, where the expectation was it would be contained. Sunday was quiet, confirming the expectation; “church, relaxing at home here, doing ordinary things with the assurance that all was well.”

But things were about to get extraordinary.

Gilmore woke on Monday to a “pall of smoke.” He drove up to the forestry station on Highway 12, “across from Bouverie’s place,” where he found convict crews from San Quentin Prison gearing up for the firefight, and a helicopter pilot who’d tried to fly fire bosses over the Mayacamas ridge to direct fire crews working on the other side. His mission failed “because winds were an estimated 75 to 80 mph up there.” The pilot eventually succeeded, Gilmore wrote, but it took him half and hour to fly the short distance to the ridgetop.

Over the course of the day, Gilmore helped direct traffic — incoming fire apparatus, “sightseers from all over God-Knows-Where [who] were clotting the highway,” and local residents like David Bouverie, who “arrived in such a panic of haste,” worried that “his home was burning down.”

By evening the wind-driven fire had burned back over Nuns Canyon and was headed Gilmore’s way. A neighbor, Windy Smith, offered space in his VW bus in case he and his family needed to evacuate, but Gilmore “pooh-poohed the notion.” Instead, he went to check on other neighbors, including the Gordenker turkey farm, rumored to have burned, but, in fact, a survivor; and the Cochranes, who also declined help evacuating. “The fire surrounded us [as] we were just sitting down to dinner,” Ros Cochrane told Gilmore. “But thank you, anyway.”

While his wife, Della, was packing clothes just in case, Gilmore continued to confirm that people and their properties were safe. “Tales kept reaching us that this or that home had gone to the ground, only to be proved wrong … the countryside was a holocaust but they [the firefighters] were saving houses,” he wrote.

With the fire blowing up all around him, though, Gilmore expressed astonishment. “The whole mountainside,” he said, “was a seething, whirling, leaping, licking mass of flames .… Never before then had I even begun to imagine how a truly big forest fire could look, could reach inside one and squeeze with awesome fear.”

His attention turned toward saving his own home and property. Della evacuated, along with family and friends. Along with Smith and Petey Narvaez, Gilmore determined the line of live oaks along the north side of his land needed to come down, “to prevent the explosive ‘topping out’ they produce when fire reaches them.” The three men pooled their resources, including ropes, fuel, block and tackle, and chainsaws, to defend against the flames.

Taking down the live oaks turned complicated when one tree hitched up on stumps. Narvaez was in another field “dropping huge live oaks like ninepins,” but he came to help Gilmore and Smith clear the stuck tree. Outfitted with fuel cans, their vehicles, and a steel cable, the men rigged a solution, but in the process Gilmore tripped over the cable and, fearing the fuel can he carried “might rupture on the rocks and really complicate our immensely explosive situation,” he took the fall on his knees and elbows, injuring his leg so badly he’d be relegating to using crutches.

But the trees were cleared, and Gilmore went home to wait with firefighters from Spring Valley for the fire to arrive. When it did, at 5 a.m., the awe, fear, and respect it inspired is vividly described in Gilmore’s next few paragraphs: “I ran out in front to assess the situation, and saw growing blossoms of red in Duncan’s field, which in a few minutes had turned into one mass of flame reaching greedily up toward our study ….When I got back up in back, the whole area exploded around me. At times I had to drop to my belly and breathe with my nose against the ground. At the north, flames were exploding in the grass and trees at the septic-tank area, and I called to reassure Della just as a wall of fire sprang 30 feet higher than the hightension lines, enveloping them and the phone lines as well.”

The phone connection survived, though the line “crackled and fried as the flames burned around it,” he wrote.

While the fire leapt and surged, the firefighters shot “towering plumes of detergent water” over the roof of Gilmore’s home, saving it from destruction. Then they moved on, leaving Gilmore, Smith, and Narvaez to put out the spot fires that flared up on the property and on surrounding land. The losses, they found, were less extreme than reported in the media. An old stable and study, a pump and tank and pumphouse, a trailer, but contrary to what newspapers said, his home and others hadn’t been destroyed. They had survived.

Over the following day, as the fire moved south down the range, Gilmore wrote of “B17s, F-7-Fs, B-26s circling, then making their low passes to drop their wet loads that are so effective it’s hard to visualize.” The fire was controlled in just over a week and didn’t breach the boundaries of the more densely populated Springs or the city of Sonoma.

The end of the letter is a celebration of community — again, a mirror of the aftermath of the 2017 fire, when neighbors reunited over shared meals and shared stories of resilience.

“It’s hotter than the hinges of hell, but with no breeze, which is more of a blessing than you can imagine,” he wrote as he signed off. “Much love from the three of us to all of you, singly and doubly, whoever you are.”