Trails End team saves homes in days-long battle

Few know about Trails End, a community burrowed in the pines of the San Bernardino National Forest where twisting forest service roads are the only way out.

That’s how folks here like it. It’s a place for risk takers and renegades, so secluded that it barely shows on a map. With the solitude comes a deeply felt conviction that, if things turn bad, the people who live here can go it alone.

That’s what happened last week when, much to the dismay of firefighters who had ordered an evacuation, a group of Trails Ends residents decided to take a stand against the searing runs of the Slide fire armed only with buckets of water and a handful of hoses.

It would be several days before firefighters could drive in safely. By then, the holdouts had become notorious at the incident command post in Snow Valley. Their decision to stay, several firefighters said, was foolish at best.

The five stragglers, most of them builders, attributed their survival, in part, to the fact that they had bonded over the previous 10 months while expanding one of the enclave’s small homes into a 4,000-square-foot house with spectacular views of Lake Arrowhead and the after-dark twinkle of Hesperia.

Steve Norris, who owns the property and lives on an adjoining lot, had hired his neighbors to do the work and hoped the resulting sale would make him enough money to pay off his mortgages and start a new career as a mountain vintner.

With Running Springs and Green Valley Lake in flames, the Trails End group decided to stay and try to save their homes.

Robert Mayes, a general contractor who discovered Trails End camping as a boy and moved in three years ago after losing his house in another fire, was among the first to see the smoke the morning of Oct. 22.

He called 911, ran up the road to tell the neighbors and then drove his wife and 30-year-old daughter to a Redlands motel.

Norris, a real estate appraiser who moved to Trails End in 2000 and now owns 15 acres, packed up too. He and his right-hand builder, Craig Berry, 25, as well as father-and-son tenants Gregory Tirheimer Sr. and Gregory Tirheimer Jr., both roofers, headed to a camping area in Big Pine Flats, six miles to the north.

It was their “safe zone,” they later explained -- an area charred by the recent Butler II fire where, undetected by San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies, they could camp and keep close tabs on the fire.

Norris used his all-terrain vehicle to drive back to Trails End twice in the thick of the fire. At noon, the five-bedroom dream house they were finishing was still standing. Four hours later it was gone, but Norris’ residence remained unscathed. The loss of one house stirred his determination to save the rest.

Mayes was having similar feelings at the Quality Inn in Redlands early last Tuesday. He awoke at 4 a.m. and told his wife he was going back. She told him he was out of his mind. Slipping through on back roads, he stopped to rouse his neighbors at the campground. “I have a sick feeling about this,” he told them. “I have to get back to my house.”

They left the campground in a caravan. Mayes, driving his truck with his son, stopped to kick flaming logs and pine cones out of the way on the forest road. The Tirheimers followed on their ATVs in short-sleeved T-shirts, hauling their seven dogs in a homemade trailer and scarcely able to breathe in the thick smoke. Tirheimer Jr., 28, could smell his eyebrows burning.

“There were fires on both sides of the road and flames coming over the top of my truck,” Mayes said. “It was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced.”

Back in Trails End, watching the fire jump from tree to tree, they ran from house to house using shovels to attack hot spots and dousing flaming tree stumps with well water. “Everyone was just everywhere, putting out every spot fire we could,” said Tirheimer Sr., 52.

At one point, fire officials circled overhead in helicopters pleading with the group to leave. “I told them I’m not leaving,” Berry said. They “looked at me like I was crazy. But this is our home.”

Mayes said the first firetruck made it to his front door Thursday as he sat on his porch. Again he told them he wouldn’t leave. “Then they called in the troops,” he said. “The air tankers came in. They went to work. . . . Anyone who complains about the fire department needs their head examined. It was incredible.”

From that point on, the men worked hand in hand with the firefighters, Tirheimer Sr. said. Though other residences in Trails End burned, each of the five friends managed to save his home.

A week after the fire’s start, the wine bottles Norris was storing in the basement of the dream house were twisted bubbles of glass. He kicked the roof tiles with his boot and watched them flutter away as ash.

The Trails End crew has promised to help him rebuild.

And after the last few days, Norris said, “they’re my best friends in all the world.”

“It takes a lot of courage to live out here in the boonies,” he said, looking over the scarred hillsides that now form his view. “But I’m safer now than I was before. I’ll plant a thousand trees if I have to. . . . I’ve never felt so comfortable in my life.”

maeve.reston@latimes.com