As wildfire closed in, he made a harrowing stand against a certain death in remote Last Chance

Sep. 8--By the time Pat Kelly got the emergency evacuation notice late on the night of Aug. 18, a rampaging wildland fire had cornered him in the remote Santa Cruz Mountains community of Last Chance.

He had only one place left to go: Under the water, and eventually, through the fire.

On Sunday, Kelly, 66, recalled the harrowing night on Pine Mountain as the CZU Lightning complex fire marched into his community of about 75 homes along the private Last Chance Road northeast of Davenport.

He said he got a Cal Fire directive to leave 15 minutes before the flames moved in -- a warning that would have put him in the path of the blaze as it burned toward his home.

"If I had followed their advice, I would be dead," Kelly said by phone from the Asilomar Hotel near Monterey.

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The ordeal began earlier, when Kelly heard about a small blaze ignited by the lightning storm near Waddell State Beach below Pine Mountain. He said he drove to the popular beach to get a status report.

Firefighters did not sound worried, Kelly said. He returned home and was heading to bed when a neighbor called at about 10 p.m.

The fire had jumped Waddell Creek and was heading directly toward him, the neighbor said. But Kelly could not see flames when checking -- just a fiery orange bank of smoke, glowing in the distance.

Then came Cal Fire's phone call to evacuate. Kelly ran down the road only to encounter white-hot flames.

He was trapped.

Kelly said he returned to his property, surrounded by scrub oaks and manzanita trees, intent on saving his home of 43 years.

There was one item in the 1,700-square foot home that meant more than everything else, he recounted: The final love letter from his deceased wife, Debra. He raced into the bedroom to grab it, fleeing the house as the windows blew out and glowing embers flew in, igniting fires wherever they landed.

As Kelly raced toward his 30,000-gallon pond, an ember landed on his hair and began smoldering immediately. He said he dove in and grabbed a foot-long metal pipe just as flames swept over him, using the pipe as a snorkel for 20 minutes.

He shielded himself with an aluminum rowboat he stored in the pond for when he planned to spread his wife's ashes in Lake Tahoe.

When Kelly resurfaced, he said, he watched his two homes and six outbuildings burn, destroying everything he and his wife had built over four decades on the 23-acre property.

"I walked right up to the edge" of death "and looked over," Kelly said.

But he was not out of danger yet. Not even close.

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Kelly and Debra, who died in 2018 after battling colon cancer for five years, left a small Michigan college in the mid-1970s to move to the Santa Cruz Mountains. They lived in a tent for three months until settling in Felton and selling real estate, Kelly said.

By 1978, the couple started living in an 8-by-12 lean-to on their property at Last Chance, a village of off-the-grid residents who held annual barn dances to help pay the property taxes and maintenance of their community center.

Wildfires had haunted their life, Kelly said, after the 2009 Lockheed fire; his home survived the blaze, but his insurance company canceled the policy. He recalled Debra Kelly trying every insurance company she could, but all agents deemed them too big of a risk.

"I am totally uninsured for everything," he said. "I've got the clothes on my back and that's it."

Without fire insurance, he said, the Kellys installed the pond, a pump and regulation fire hoses, and kept 20,000 gallons of water in storage tanks. But Kelly said even with 10 times the equipment, he could not have saved the home that had "one of the best views in the state."

Kelly said he stayed in the water for about three hours, though much of the night was a haze. Eventually, he climbed out, using a three-foot berm next to the pond to shield him from the scalding heat. He could hear two cords of wood near the home, feeding the flames, and the telltale sounds of exploding propane tanks.

When he woke in the blackness of night, Kelly said, he realized he was left for dead. He had one way to make it out of Last Chance: Hike eight miles downhill to Highway 1.

On the first effort, he fell into a six-foot hole where a tree had toppled. Kelly returned to his property and found one of his solar spotlights still shining, using it to guide him across rough fire-stricken terrain and avoid fallen trees, some still burning.

The first glimmer of dawn beckoned as Kelly reached Last Chance Road, a six-mile stretch that had been the lifeline of the community.

His eyes felt like they had cinders in them, he said. His lungs burned. He yelled out, and a ghostlike figure appeared from the smoke. He met a man he knows only as "Jason," who he said described an equally gripping escape.

The men descended together for a bit in a surreal landscape that looked like a CGI-created movie scene. Kelly said by the sixth mile it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other while wearing boat shoes he bought 20 years ago.

The other man, about half Kelly's age, went ahead and told a Cal Fire official about his companion. Firefighters reached Kelly on the road and took him to Davenport, he said.

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That morning Toni McAuliffe and her husband Bob were in their 26-foot trailer in Davenport. They had left Last Chance the previous night with their dog, Gus, and cat, Luna, after the smoke became too strong.

They had also thought the fire was too far away to reach their community -- 1 1/2 hours before evacuation orders were sent. They had also lost their home, about two miles downhill from Kelly's place.

McAuliffe saw a man standing outside the trailer. His face was blackened, she said.

Then she realized it was Kelly, their friend of four decades. The McAuliffes gave Kelly a change of clothes as he chugged down three full glasses of water.

The McAuliffes said they plan to rebuild. Toni McAuliffe said many of her neighbors also say they do not want to give up on their beloved hideaway next to Big Basin State Park.

"It is not going to be the beautiful place it was, but Mother Nature has a way of replacing itself," she said.

Kelly said he was not sure what comes next. Monday, he was planning to move into a friend's home in Capitola. Perhaps he will return to Pine Mountain someday, he said.

He pondered living in his basement, which he had converted into a wine cellar.

"I feel like I got hit by a big wave at Mavericks and I'm trying to figure out a way to the surface," Kelly said.

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