Fires and Floods Forced Us Off Our B.C. Ranch
Since 1990, my husband, Wayne, and I have raised cattle and run a beef business. Wayne and our sons, Wyatt and Garrett, are from the Shackan Indian Band, so we bought our first piece of ranch land in 1995, on a reserve 35 kilometres west of Merritt, B.C., next to the Nicola River. We built our ranch from scratch: we cleared the land and built corrals, a house and a riding arena. Over the years, we expanded our ranch to 60 hectares so our cattle could roam more freely and we could store more hay bales. We also leased 40,000 hectares of Crown land, which form the range at the top of our hayfield. Wyatt lives in a mobile home on the property.
We’ve endured harsh weather in the past, with torrential rains flooding the ditch at the end of our driveway. But we’d never experienced a summer like 2021. In late June of that year, wildfires burned down the small town of Lytton, which was 48 kilometres away. The next day, Arnold Lampreau, chief of the Shackan Indian Band, issued mandatory evacuation orders in our area. Wayne and I were in our mid-50s, and our livelihoods were tied to our ranch. We wanted to spend the rest of our working days maintaining our land and taking care of our cattle. So we stayed put and took precautions against the fire threat. Wayne cleared dead vegetation behind our mechanical shop and storage buildings. We also removed dry sage brush near electrical power poles, which are highly flammable, and outfitted two of our dump trucks with water tanks.
Six weeks after the evacuation orders, at about 8:30 p.m., I was resting in the house. Wayne texted me from the yard, “You better come out and look at this.” When I got outside, he was standing in the middle of the yard, pointing south, where our cattle usually roam the pasture. I saw flames ripping across the top of our range and consuming trees and grass. They were less than a kilometre away from our house, and they were only getting closer—forecasts warned of wind gusts up to 23 kilometres per hour. Wayne and I took turns sleeping so we could monitor the fires. We also reached out to Yellowhead Road and Bridge, a private company where Garrett worked, which lent us a water truck for free.
The next morning, at 6:30 a.m., I started hauling our four horses to a friend’s pasture just outside of Merritt, which was about 20 minutes away by car. Garrett, Wyatt and their girlfriends helped us. Wayne called in two people he knew to bring cattle trailers, which we used to load and transport our cows. Two neighbours, Matt and Rob, also pitched in: Rob ushered cows into the trucks even as his own house was engulfed in flames. Just past noon, the flames crested the mountain at the top of our range. We heard them roaring above the sounds of the cows, trucks and shouts of everyone who was helping us. It had become unbearably hot and hard to breathe; the fires were sucking oxygen from the air.
We’d planned on staying until we lost power. Then we saw fire tornadoes—huge twisting columns of fire, whipped up by high winds—racing down the mountain toward us. I rushed off the property with 16 cattle in my pickup truck and trailer and headed for Kamloops, while the rest of my family went to stay at Wayne’s mother’s house, which was 5 kilometres away from our ranch. In the end, we got 73 cows, 12 heifers and four bulls off the land. The destruction from that day was devastating: we lost 37 cows and close to $100,000 worth of fencing.
When we returned early the next morning, we were elated to see that our house was still there—and so were the five calves that we left behind in our riding arena, which was safe because of its sandy floors. Their eyes were wide, and they tried to escape from us as they were still frightened. We loaded them up and brought them to join their moms and the other cattle.
We stayed at Wayne’s mother’s house for three days before moving back to the ranch along with our animals. Then we took on a massive clean-up. Fallen trees from the nearby mountainous area had clogged up our driveway and threatened to spark power lines. Wayne and I rolled up lines of burnt fencing that had once bordered areas of our property. We spent a lot of time on horseback and in a B.C. Wildfire helicopter, looking for cattle. Wayne managed to spot eight that had survived. There wasn’t any time to mourn what we had lost, because the animals needed to be fed and we needed to make the hay for the winter.
Three months later, we were under siege again—this time by flood rather than fire. Our phone rang late one night in November. It was a friend. “We’re watching the Coldwater River. It’s going to flood, and it’s going to be bad,” he said. The Coldwater River is the largest tributary of the Nicola River, whose rushing waters flow past our house and ranch. After that phone call, Wayne and I kept an eye on the river, monitoring the water levels every few hours.
For 36 relentless hours, the rain poured down, dropping over 20 centimetres of water over two days—an amount we’d typically see in an entire year. The Nicola River, once a safe distance from our home, surged as tall as four metres. Within another day, the water had flooded and eroded chunks of our land. The rain was so severe it was labelled an atmospheric river, a phenomenon where water vapour combines with high-speed winds to produce large amounts of rainfall in watershed areas.
We sprang out of bed and checked on our animals, which were in the pasture. We moved the cattle to the higher part of the field in the middle of the night, then went back to bed. The next morning, the Nicola River had swollen higher than we’d ever seen it. We learned that 20,000 people in and around Merritt were being evacuated because the river had breached its banks.
I couldn’t process what was happening. We kept watching the waters rise all day and into the evening. At 6:30 p.m., Wayne pulled me aside and told me the river had reached the wheel line, which is an irrigation machine that redirects water from the Nicola River to other parts of our land. “Oh my God,” I said. “It’s come over the top of the hayfield?” Then he gave me the funniest look and said, “No, the field is gone—that’s the river now.” The water was eating away at the land and drawing it into its currents.
Just as we had months earlier, we gathered our horses into a trailer and brought them close to Highway 8, as high as we could go. All of our cattle remained in the hayfield. At midnight, I returned to our house and was startled by a series of loud booms. I walked onto our deck and looked out toward the river, where I saw an enormous shipping container gliding across what used to be our horse pasture below the hayfield. The steel cargo unit was crashing against the rocks that the river, now flowing over our land, had laid bare.
The next day, we took stock. We lost more than $350,000 worth of irrigation equipment and half a million dollars in fencing. Our 80-acre hayfield lay in ruins, covered in nearly five feet of silt left behind as the floodwaters receded. Worse, the Merritt Septic Treatment Plant had been flooded, leaving untreated sewage to seep into the ground and spread throughout the area. The most devastating loss for us was the land. We lost seven of our 45 acres. The sheer force of the river stripped away parts of our property and carried them to other parts of the river.
We were in crisis mode, without any power or running water. Cattle roamed the hayfield, but we had no way to give them water. I felt numb most days during the first month as we cleaned up the damage. The extent of the devastation was overwhelming. Yet, as before, we had no choice but to rebuild. Three days after the flood, we borrowed a generator from my former employer, Salmon Arm Crushing, to power our house and our well. We fed our cows with hay that had survived in our shed. Determined to protect what was left, Wayne and some volunteers laid down sandbags to redirect the river’s flow away from the house. We even installed new fencing, provided by the provincial forest ministry, to keep the cattle from falling into the river, which now covered large sections of our land. With the new barriers in place, the animals were finally safe.
We thought the reinforcements we’d made to our property would hold, but nothing could’ve prepared us for the extreme rainfall that hit us the following August. Within just 25 minutes, seven centimetres of rain poured down. I was cleaning the top floor of our house—my mother had passed away in February of 2021, and we were preparing for her celebration of life—when suddenly my dog started barking. When I turned around, I saw a wall of mud, a foot deep and at least four metres wide, barrelling down the driveway at 25 kilometres per hour. The mudslide had formed as water, dirt, stones, and debris gathered from the highest mountain peak near our property, cascading down with unstoppable force.
I rushed outside and jumped into the skid steer, a small machine equipped with a metal bucket for digging. I began pushing the encroaching mud away from the house, knowing that if it started to accumulate, it would harden like concrete and become impossible to remove. Wave after wave of mud kept coming. Eventually, the onslaught stopped, and I surveyed the damage. The hayfield was buried under five feet of mud and rock. I was numb, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of destruction that had occurred in such a short time.
My heart raced as I peered through the fog and mist over the pasture: I couldn’t see my son Wyatt’s mobile home. He was at work, but I feared that the mudslide had destroyed his home. All I could see were rocks, broken trees and waves of mud surging past where his trailer stood. Later, Wayne radioed to let me know that Wyatt’s home was still standing, but the mudslide had destroyed his yard, septic system and shed. It washed away all the fruit trees planted nearby. It was utter devastation. I guess I have to call off the celebration of life, I thought. That evening, the tears came as I processed the day’s events.
At that point, we seriously considered quitting ranching and leaving everything behind. But we felt a deep responsibility to care for our animals. Besides, after living for almost 30 years on the ranch, we had no idea where else to go. So we stayed. We were going to make the best of what remained.
With our land in ruins, running cattle and producing fresh hay bales was impossible. So we decided to rent a ranch while we restored our property, . Prices were steep and availability was limited because many evacuees were still renting homes in our area after the atmospheric river flooding in Merritt. Luckily, a friend had a small ranch one kilometre outside of Merritt. She and her husband were life-savers; they gave us free rein to do whatever was needed to keep our scaled-down business running on her land. We signed a two-year lease.
During that time, we worked to repair our own land. We used our own heavy equipment and hired a crew to clear the mud, rocks and debris. Volunteers and neighbours also generously offered their time to help. We’ve since replaced many of the fences and corrals and reinstalled our irrigation systems. The fields were starting to look green again. With the land revived, we’ve started growing crops once more.
There were moments when I felt scared about returning to our ranch and living in that area. We have fire insurance, but it doesn’t cover the loss of livestock or fencing. Our ranch is also not eligible for flood insurance because we live in a high-risk area. But we held out hope. We were out on the land every day, watching crews fortify parts of the property that couldn’t withstand the extreme weather events of 2021 and 2022. This month, the Ministry of Transportation is building a berm, or a small hill, near our house to divert any future mudslides. We’re placing heavy rocks along the riverbank to prevent erosion and keep the land from being washed away. And crews are building a dike in the Nicola River to deflect water and debris away from the ranch. There would be risks wherever we choose to live. I am ready to return home.
The lease on our rental expires in September, and we’ve decided not to renew it. We’re the kind of people who dig in our heels, take what life throws at us and make it work. This summer, we helped our neighbours battle their own fires, which have burnt the feet of their cattle and some mothers’ udders, making them unable to nurse their calves. We want to help them just as they rallied around us during our own crises. Even now, three years later, I still get choked up thinking about all the cattle we’d lost in that first devastating wildfire. As their stewards, it’s our responsibility to give them a good life and a good death. People may say it wasn’t our fault, but the loss still hurts deeply.
Leaving our ranch temporarily helped us cope with the mourning that comes from losing animals and parts of our home. Now we’re strengthening the vulnerable areas of our ranch to floods and mudslides. And geological engineers have told us that while large landslides could still occur, the risk of severe damage is lower now since there isn’t much debris left above our property. We’re now able to move beyond our grief and forge new paths. Ranching is all I’ve ever known—I just want to go home.
—As told to Maria Calleja
