JANUARY 2018 • COUNTRY LIFE IN BC New year,


new start Six months after wildfire tore through their Princeton ranch, the Schneiders are


ready to rebuild by PETER MITHAM


PRINCETON – Quentin Schneider had headed into Princeton on July 7 to fetch a part for his mower, which had broken down as equipment tends to do on the first day of haying. The skies were clear and his wife Sheena was about to hang laundry when a vehicle pulled into the yard. A plume of smoke was


rising from the forested slope beyond their ranch, about 12 kilometres outside of town on Highway 5A towards Merritt. It looked to be from a large campfire but the only people in the vicinity were loggers. Schneider thanked her visitors for the tip and called it in, but a few minutes later, another car stopped. They could see flames.


Schneider began gathering


horses, preparing for the worst. Soon, neighbours pulled in, pumping water over the family home and helping pull together equipment and animals. “It spread fast,” she says.


“Within 45 minutes from when I actually called it in, it had come over the hill, jumped the highway and started on our range side, so it was burning on both sides of the highway and both sides of our house.” The two Schneider


children, seven and 11, pitched in, loading the family car with photo albums while Quentin and another man worked to save equipment.


Sheena loaded animals on trailers and drove to Norm and Hallie Breen’s place, five kilometres east. The kids went, too, eventually staying with their grandparents for the duration. The horses, cats,


her pot-bellied pig and daughter’s rabbit were saved, but the cattle were a mystery. “Our big


In the heat of the moment. Shortly after the first sign of wildfire was spotted at a logging operation near by the Schneider ranch in Princeton, neighbours arrived to help with the evacuation. QUENTIN SCHNEIDER PHOTO


concern was our cattle given that it jumped on the range right away,” she recalls. “In that instance, you don’t know exactly where your cows are at any given time.” The fire kept growing and the Schneiders eventually told neighbours to go save their own places. “The police obviously at some point came and told everybody they needed to evacuate,” she adds. “It’s just unreal how fast the fire moved. It was just jumping tree to tree. … My husband said it was like creating its own storm. He couldn’t even keep his hat on his head, it was just sucking all the air.”


Shifting situation The next morning, while


crews struggled to fight fires sparked by 142 lightning strikes in the tinder-dry Cariboo, the Schneiders drove back from Princeton and –


with the magnitude of the situation still emerging – were allowed to check their property. “It just looked like an apocalypse,” she says. “We came around the corner where the valley opened up and our house was still there. But everything – our shop was levelled, there were trees down, rocks on the road and things still on fire.”


While it was tough to leave


the property, the Schneiders’ knew their grandfather’s cattle were on local rangeland and at risk so they spent the weekend trucking cattle to safer range. The growth of the fires through the weekend soon saw the evacuation zone widened to include where they were staying, which was an advantage – they no longer had to pass through a checkpoint and so long as they stayed on their own ranch, they couldn’t be forced out.


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www.horstwagons.com www.horstwelding.com 1.866.567.4162 “Once you’re on your own


property, they can’t make you leave,” she says. “We made it back to our place on Monday, and we got our ATV and went


up onto our range and we found a group of our cows. They were right on the edge


See WILDFIRE on next page o


19


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