July 15, 2012, Roundup, MT

Well, where do I begin.  Our summer started out really good with a wonderful trip up and down the Cumberland River.  But, our wonderful summer ended on Tuesday, June 26, 2012. 

It started with a call from a friend in Roundup telling us there was a wild fire in the mountains by our place but she did not know just how bad it was.  We tried calling our neighbors but couldn't get through.  We left early on Wednesday, June 27th, and headed for Montana and about 10:00 we got a call from our neighbor telling us that the wild fire totally destroyed our place along with almost every other house on Buckskin and Short Cut roads.  Although we knew we lost everything, it did not really register until we were able to go up to our land on Saturday, June 30th.  There was nothing left but ashes and metal.  Keith's sister Karen drove over with her truck and the 3 of us sifted through the ashes for 2 days looking for something we could salvage but did not have much luck.  On the 3rd day it took the locksmith all day long to open our 2 safes (supposedly fire proof) only to find more ashes and metal.  That did it, we gave up looking and called a salvage company to come in and clean up the mess.  Now we are hassling with our insurance company.  After almost 3 weeks, we are still itemizing everything we owned.  It is a very  hard and frustrating thing to do and we both just want to settle with insurance and put this behind us.  The fire burned so hard it just scorched the land and all the trees are charcoal.  It is very hard to look at.  We lost our home, our cabin and out buildings, 3 vehicles, a dune buggy, and 2 hunting trailers, as well as all our personal belongings.  We don't know what we are going to do next other than go the our son's house in Wisconsin and we will regroup there.  We are doing our best to look to the future; some days are better than others. 

CO's comments:  Who would have ever thought that any thing like this would happen to them at this stage of their lives.  I guess the old saying "Shit Happens" is true.  Bobbie and I will grab our boot straps and start a new adventure.  We will go see our grand children and then head for the boat after our visit and put this all behind us.

Where our home was.

Where our cabin and trophy room used to be.

Hunting Trailer was here.

What is left of one of our out building.

Generator out building was here.

This is where our hot tub and well used to be.

Keith's Yukon

Bobbie's Geo Tracker

Keith's truck with tempered glass windshield melted over steering wheel

Tractor, fire so hot it deformed the rims

Dune Buggy and Cargo trailer, so hot it bent the steel frane on cargo trailer

Our freezer was half full of elk

Keith by safes

Fire Storm Freeze; force of fire and wind
(wind that day were sustained winds of 60 mph and  gusts to 80 mph)

Only green tree left on our land

Last load of salvage

We lost all our 4 wheel drive vehicles so Woody, our friend and Sheriff, took us out to our land to see the clean up.