This article was submitted by the Mendocino Fire Safe Council. It has been edited for length by the Mendocino Voice.
WILLITS, CA., 5/25/25 — When the five-acre Ridge Fire broke out at the top of Pine Mountain the afternoon of May 6, the situation looked dicey.
The wildfire rapidly expanded on Pine Mountain, located eight miles outside of Willits. But firefighters had a strategic advantage: during the fall of 2024, neighbors working with the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council had pitched in to help a Pine Mountain landowner create a strategic fuel break that did exactly what it was supposed to do — stop a wildfire from spreading into the larger community.
No structures were damaged, and no injuries were reported, though the incident was a close call. It didn’t get widespread attention because, thanks to that fire break, it was not much of an event.
That wasn’t the case in 2017, when the Redwood Complex Fire was visible from the Pine Mountain ridgeline. Tom Varney was among residents who fled before the threat of wind-driven flames. When he returned to his home, he saw that Cal Fire had cut a line through the forest bordering the meadow behind his house, down a steep hillside almost to the Willits end of Tomki Road.
At the time, Varney was not pleased. The firefighters’ bulldozers had pushed down hundreds of trees, which then had to be cleaned up. Still, he explained, “The fire wasn’t close in 2017, several miles away, but this was the most strategic place we could try to do an auxiliary fire break if the wind had shifted and the fire started coming north. This would have been our place where we would have made a stand to try to keep it from heading down into Willits.” Over the next seven years, he picked away at the mountain of foliage.
Last September, a Mendocino County Fire Safe Council work party brought neighbors from all over the area to give the effort another big push. The work parties are a Measure P-funded program that allows the council to augment volunteer efforts with a five-person paid work crew, chipper, and tools, all at no direct cost to the beneficiaries. An important feature of the community work parties is that their location is determined using local knowledge of the greatest risks to the neighborhood, focusing on vulnerabilities that large-scale projects might miss.
Angie Herman extolled the work her neighbor had done to maintain fire resiliency on his property. “It’s amazing, how much work he has done,” she said, pausing from her uphill climb with the chainsaw she was using to limb up trees. “The fact that this was a fire break [from 2017], we may as well maintain it. It’s here already. We’re cleaning up what’s grown back, and what he couldn’t get to.”
The Ridge Fire on May 6 moved fast. Varney was outside getting some work done in the early afternoon when he saw flames moving across the green grass on the slope. “I was down there trying to put it out with a shovel,” he recalled. It was “very smoky, and very traumatic. I was working on it for a while, and it started getting hot on my foot. I looked down, and saw my pant leg was on fire. That kind of freaked me out a little bit.”
After he put out the fire on his leg, he called the fire department and then went back to work with the shovel. As the fire started heading for much drier grass, three fire agencies showed up: the Little Lake Fire Protection District, the Brooktrails Fire Department, and Cal Fire. They stopped the fire at five acres in under an hour.
“If it had jumped the area where we did that fire break [in September], it would have gone down the hill, and I don’t think they would have put it out for hours,” said Randy McDonald, another neighbor who is always fire-ready. While Varney was fighting the flames in the grassland, McDonald was dousing them closer to Varney’s house, with water from his 400-gallon water tank. “I need a bigger one,” McDonald laughed. He mostly uses it to keep the dust down on the roads, but he’s deployed it three times now on a fire. “I did put all the attachments on it,” he said, including a 400-foot hose and all the nozzles. He also installed a mechanism to fill it quickly at his house. “It’s been a lifesaver,” he added.
Varney believes that without the fire break, the flames could have easily torn into the woods, where the terrain is not easily accessible and landowners have installed locked gates across narrow, treacherous roads. He says the early-season fire made him realize how much of a help the neighborhood work party was, both in helping with physical safety and creating a sense of community. “One person came all the way from Brooktrails,” he reported. “I was amazed that I met some people I didn’t even know, and they were willing to go to someone’s property and help with the fire defense…People who realized, we’re all in the same boat.”
McDonald commended his neighbor, saying, “This guy takes great care of his property.” But as the wind picked up and pushed embering tanoak leaves ahead of the main fire, he thought back to 2017. “When you’ve got fire and you’ve got wind, you’ve got troubles,” he said. “They all start small, and then they get bigger.”
Sarah Reith writes articles on behalf of the Mendocino Fire Safe Council.