Schultz also became close with Shelton's mom, Karla, whose last name is Schultz, but in an irony, isn't related to James Schultz. Schultz, 32, and Shelton, 22, became best friends after Schultz's mother died about six years ago. "He's one of those guys everybody knows," Cathi Metzger said, "He's a sweet guy and he would hate me calling him sweet." He also had worked as a cook at "The Junction" roadhouse, the only business for miles. Postal Service left off, around mile marker 11 on Mines Road. As a contractor, Schultz picked up where the U.S. He delivered the mail on this rural route each Tuesday and Friday with his dog Blue in the back seat _ a Catahoula cattle dog that's also good for pig hunting. They're also worried about Schultz, who has burns over 75% of his body, and Shelton, who is burned over 35% of his. Ever since that first lightning bolt, we haven't slept much." "It's a scary thing when you look down into the face of a fire," said Metzger, 57, whose wife has since rejoined him at their Avalon Ranch. He's been up every night since, putting out spot fires and rescuing neighbors dogs and a litter of kittens. The next day, the fire jumped two ravines behind his house in less than an hour. He was just about to give up when Cal Fire crews arrived and helped save the home they built from scratch. "We're on a mission that I gotta give it everything I got," Mark Biel, 64, said.Ī few miles up the road just across the Alameda County line, rancher Erich Metzger stayed up all night fighting the fire that roared down onto his property last Wednesday while his wife, Cathi, who had evacuated, called for help. She and her husband, whose family homesteaded more than 6,000 acres a century ago, are sleeping in their boots and jeans every night. "It's burned on three different days," Biel said from the hillside ranch Monday, looking out across the blackened ridges across from their property. They've been watching the fire come and go for days and enduring "knock-you-over kind of wind," Biel said. Most truck in their water and generate their own power from the sun and wind.īiel has been sliding down hillsides with a chainsaw this week, she says, clearing manzanita and brush next to her family's cabin as the fire blew up on the hillside across from their ranch.īiel and her husband, Mark, along with a number of others ignored evacuation orders so they could protect their properties with the bulldozers and water tanks of ranch life that do double duty for fires. The hardy folks who live here - locals estimate several hundred - pride themselves on their independence and self-sufficiency. But the area is so remote and sparsely inhabited that fewer than two dozen structures have been destroyed, a fraction of the destruction in the LNU and CZU fires burning closer to the region's population centers from Napa and Vacaville to the Santa Cruz Mountains. Out here, the SCU Lightning Complex has burned up 364,000 acres - more than three times the size of San Jose. "I haven't cried all week until now," said Katrina Biel, who started a fundraiser with her "Sagebrush Sisters" book club for the young men being treated at the University of California, Davis burn center. But their ordeal has brought closer together the self-described "Hill People" who live on these distant ranches in a place that is completely foreign to the 6 million people on the other side of the hill. They had been desperately setting up sprinklers to save their trailers and other buildings on the property.Ī week later, their survival story is harrowing and their burns are horrendous - Shelton's are mostly on his arms and torso from smothering the flames that engulfed Schultz. And suddenly the whipping inferno overran James Schultz, the beloved local mail carrier, and Tom Shelton, an iron worker whom Schultz considered a brother. When the flames arrived, the winds violently shifted. The second-largest wildfire in California history took four days to reach Karla Schultz's 88-acre ranch in the rugged ridges and ravines behind Mount Hamilton, a place so far in the eastern reaches of Santa Clara County that it's closer to the Central Valley than Silicon Valley in nearly every way.
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