When the Autumn Lane Fire ignited Aug. 1 — one of the three Spokane Complex fires — Alicia Beth and her husband, Chris, decided to spend some time outdoors.
They’d started work on a new greenhouse earlier that morning and thought they could take the rest of the day off. Just as they reached Spokane Mountain, they heard about the fires sparking around the county — and eventually decided to head home.
They made a game plan. Packed up the important stuff. Then a friend called and said, "Hey, there's a fire popped up behind you," Alicia Beth recalled. ‘My husband ran down to the lake, looked over and said, ‘Holy cow, we gotta go.’”
They turned on a sprinkler closest to the house and jumped in their car. At the time, the flames were about a quarter mile away from their home in Nine Mile Falls, an unincorporated community outside Spokane.
“We left and just prayed,” she said.
The fire burned through their neighborhood, quick and hot. Flames rushed by so fast that firefighters never made it to their property.
A day later, they learned their house was still standing. Two barns were rubble.
The house still stood, Beth said, thanks to the acre of trees they’d thinned and the fire protection they’d done around it.
Even so, she said, “ I didn't really believe I was in a fire area, and then I didn't really believe it was gonna happen to me because what are the odds?”
Before the fire, the Beths had asked for a free home assessment from the Spokane Conservation District to help their home better withstand a potential wildfire. They cut away landscaping that was five or ten feet from their house, planted low-growing greenery and placed rocks in flower beds.
Then, they called Washington state’s Department of Natural Resources to advise them on thinning trees on their 5 acres. The state offers a cost-share program, now known as its financial assistance program for wildfire resilience and forest health, for non-industrial landowners.
The Beths concentrated on the acre closest to their home, based on advice from department forester Jaime Rohrbach.
The program typically advises people to thin trees so they have a 15- to 20-foot spacing, and to cut the lower limbs as high as you can safely reach with a chainsaw, Rohrbach said. Those low limbs are a type of ladder fuel. Flames can climb them like rungs and more easily reach the tree canopy.
“With the cost-share program, there are two ways landowners can do the job. They can either do the work themselves and get reimbursed for a portion of their cost, or they can contract it out, and then we reimburse them for the portion that the contractor,” Rohrbach said.
However, many federal grants now no longer allow people to DIY their wildfire resilience projects, she said.
“So we're seeing a reduced amount of funding for these do-it-yourself people,” Rohrbach said.
Beth said they likely wouldn’t have done the work if they’d had to use a contractor. Now, the department said it’s finding other grants or funds for people who want to do their own work.
“ I like the do-it-yourself method because they have what I call sweat equity in the project. They put time and energy into it. You're out there maintaining it because you know, ‘If I let this grow back up, I know how much work it is,'” said Steve Harris, DNR’s assistant region manager for forest regulation and resilience in the northeast region.
That maintenance is key in thinning projects, Harris added.
“ It's not a one-and-done,” he said. “It's like mowing your lawn. You can't just mow it once and walk away from it."
In December 2024, the Beths finished thinning, pruning, removing brush and chipping slash debris on an acre of their land. Federal grants awarded to the department split the work costs 50-50 with the family.
Beth said they worked eight- to 10-hour days for two weeks straight.
They removed about 200 trees from that one acre, she said.
“ I think the hardest part for us was cutting down trees,” she said. “We moved up here from California, and it was just crowded, and we came up here and thought, ‘Oh, the nature's so beautiful,’ and the idea of cutting down trees, it was really hard.”
But once the trees were gone, Beth said she didn’t miss them like she expected.
“ The hardest selling point to a landowner is convincing them that, one, overstocking isn't healthy for the forest. And two, we have that fire danger,” Rohrbach said.
Lower intensity fires historically came through this area every 10 or 15 years, Rohrbach said. That was good for alicforest health and helped prevent the overgrowth that can fuel these catastrophic fires.
The Beths went back through this year and pruned much of the regrowth.
On the other acres where the Beths hadn’t thinned yet, the fire torched lots of trees. It also destroyed their two barns. Just past their immediate neighbors, homes didn’t fare as well.
Now, the couple are taking down many of the hazardous burned trees.
