Cascade Locks residents look back 5 years after the Eagle Creek Fire
By Jeffrey Lindblom
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CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon (KPTV) — It has been five years since the Eagle Creek Fire burned roughly 50,000 acres near the Columbia River.
Some people lost their homes and others were evacuated.
For some people living in Cascade Locks, like Jerry Eekhoff, five years ago feels like yesterday.
“I mean, it just feels like a little while ago,” Eekhoff laughed, “but I’m 77 years old, so I’m not all here anymore.”
Eekhoff wishes he still had the photographs he took from his yard as the Eagle Creek Fire burned, but they’ve since been lost.
He explained jovially that he lost them after he “fell in the river.”
Even still, unlike the smoke that was in the air at the time, he remembers it clear as day.
“It was right above the freeway here,” Eekhoff said, pointing right up the hillside near his home. “Which is just a couple hundred yards from where we are. You can see all the burnt trees. It was big flames and smoke. It was huge. We were lucky that they had all the helicopters and big planes protecting us here.”
While firefighters helped keep his home protected from the flames, they couldn’t protect him from crime he said was spreading just as fast as the fire.
“There were vandals sneaking around,” Eekhoff said. “Things were disappearing. It was a chaotic time. There are bad people that take advantage of that sadness, so to speak.” Which is why he had three trailers packed and ready to go with his most precious things, “ready to drag out of here.”
One of those same trailers is now occupied by his friend Charlie Servis, who was hiking one of his favorite trails just a week before it was engulfed in flames. He recalled the time before the fire, “the mist would come off the canyon walls and keep you cool. It was just a beautiful hike.”
As for the fire, Servis said, “it took away all the beauty of it. Now, you’re just hiking to hike. You’re not out there just taking in the beauty, you’re more worried about the burnt trees. Before you couldn’t take enough pictures.”
Servis said even though the area used to be far plusher and greener, a lot of the plant life has started to come back, and the hike is still a worthwhile one. “It’s slowly coming back, but it’s going to take a long time.”
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