Holy Jim was a sanctuary from modern life. After this latest fire, it could soon become a memory

Katie Saalfeld sat on a stone wall, her head turned toward the creek below, where, as a child, she whiled away many an afternoon chasing salamanders.

She wiped away tears.

Behind her lay the ruins of her late father’s cabin.

Farther down the narrow, dusty road that winds through Holy Jim Canyon, there was more destruction, a forest’s worth of evidence of wildfires’ unbridled, yet capricious, power:

Where cabins once stood, stone foundations encircled ash heaps. Charred elder trees and the fallen...