After weeks of fire, smoke and warnings, Kimberly Price and her beloved town had run out of time.
With wind driving the Dixie fire directly into Greenville, Price’s longtime partner, John Hunter, told her she needed to leave. Price, 58, had spent most of her life in the close-knit Sierra Nevada community. She couldn’t bear the thought of leaving, but the flames were everywhere.
She made Hunter promise he would follow, and then she left Greenville, driving away from the home she had bought from her grandparents, with the butterfly bushes and cherry trees she carefully tended, away from the house where her granddaughters had spent their whole lives, away from the storage unit that held handmade Christmas ornaments and her mother’s belongings, and away from the 92-year-old store hardware store that Hunter owned.
Within an hour, most of it was gone.
Flames overtook the Gold Rush town of 1,000 people on…