This Bountiful family is sustained by prayer after their home was destroyed in a wildfire sparked by an unattended campfire

Bountiful • Even days after Cherilyn Fisher and her husband Daniel fled their home in the foothills of Bountiful, alongside the hundreds of others trying to outrun red-orange flames descending from the mountain, it doesn’t seem real.

Sometimes she has to sit right in front of the carnage for it to really sink in.

That’s where Cherilyn Fisher was Friday. Resting in a lawn chair, feet from the railroad tie steps that led to her home for the last 17 years. Now the stairs ascend to nearly nothing.

Just a brick foundation covered in ash, charred wood and heat-warped metal — all that’s left of their possessions, of the home where the Fisher family has shared so many Thanksgivings and Christmases. Of the living room where the Fishers’ daughter, Sheila, was married.

“It’s surreal,” Cherilyn Fisher said. “The reality of it, especially if you lived in a house for 17 years. You look at it, and your mind won’t let you believe it.”

The Gun Range Fire sparked just after midnight on Aug. 30, apparently from the remains of an unattended campfire. More than 400 homes were evacuated as firefighters fought the blaze, which consumed more than 300 acres. Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands spokesman Jason Curry said Friday that investigators haven’t made any arrests. Police had been looking for a small sport utility vehicle in connection with the blaze.

The Fisher family had dealt with some small fires in the past. But nothing like this.

The night the blaze began, the Fishers were still awake. Cherilyn Fisher had recently returned from an out-of-town trip, and Daniel Fisher was up in the breakfast nook/family room watching “NYPD Blue.” As he described it, they were just chilling.

At some point, Cherilyn Fisher said, she smelled smoke, and her husband brushed her off. He has the nose in the family, he said. But she wouldn’t drop it, so he looked out the window.

"All I can see is a mountain of fire,” he said. He craned his neck up, and still couldn’t spot where the flames ended.

Both left with just the clothes on their backs and some essentials. As the neighborhood emergency coordinator, Daniel Fisher helped a neighbor with dementia evacuate. By that time, hot ash was abundant, burning his head and hair.

The Fishers soon got to safety, and then started a chain of phone calls to other neighbors to make sure they were safe.

And still, it didn’t register with either of them that their home could be gone when they finally returned, whenever that would be.

“We thought, ‘Oh, the firemen will get it out.’ We never thought we’d come back to a burnt house,” Cherilyn Fisher said.

The fire ultimately consumed three homes: the Fishers', their neighbors’ and a house further up the mountain. No one was hurt.

As three generations of Fishers wandered around the remains Friday, they pointed to the things they recognized among the ash.

Daniel Fisher’s motorcycle, a Victory Vegas. Once, he said, it was “pristine," better than a Harley and with only 12,000 miles on it. He always kept it covered when he wasn’t riding. Now it’s not much more than a skeletal fuel tank. The heat melted its engine.

Sheila Hare, the Fishers’ daughter, found some of her mother’s art in the rubble. It was a calendar page with a tree. “It looks like the tree’s on fire,” she said.

Right over there, Ryan Hare said, gesturing to the space just in front of the still-standing brick fireplace, that’s where he asked Daniel for permission to marry Sheila. And where the couple later got married.

“It’s crazy how many memories get locked into a little piece of land,” he said, as their children wandered near the rubble nearby. “You live your life. You’re out and about, but a lot of who you are gets kind of tied into a 1,000 square feet.”

Since the fire, the Fishers have lived in a few places, surviving on the kindness of friends, family, neighbors and strangers. Sheila Hare has a set up a fundraiser to help her parents rebuild and buy new things because their insurance didn’t cover the items lost inside the house.

Now that the fire is over, the family isn’t out of danger just yet. There could always be another fire, sure. But now they also must deal with the potential for dangerous flooding in the burn scar, Bountiful city officials announced Thursday on Twitter.

“Scorched soil after a fire becomes hydrophobic — water repelling. So when rain falls following a fire, it has a tendency to get the soils moving rather than penetrating the earth like normal. And it doesn’t take much water,” state officials warned.

It’s a lot to deal with, but the Fisher family says they get by on the kindness of others and, most of all, prayer.