Glass fire inflicts major damage on houses on historic Los Alamos Road

Oct. 3--The chit-chat seemed to soothe his nerves, so Keith Rhinehart kept up a steady stream of it as he made his way along Los Alamos Road, to the 25-acre property that's been in his family for 60 years.

This was late Wednesday morning. On a lunch break from teaching an online class, Rhinehart was in the passenger seat of a car navigating this scenic, oak-lined hilly road, to see if the family's two homes were still standing.

He hadn't been on Los Alamos since Sunday night, when the Glass fire made its sudden dash over the Mayacamas Mountains and into east Santa Rosa. Rhinehart had less than an hour to gather belongings and get down the hill.

To make room for his two dogs in his pickup truck during the hasty departure, the 67-year-old -- who is running as a 3rd District write-in candidate for the Santa Rosa City Council -- tossed out all of his campaign signs.

The farther he got up Los Alamos three days later, the more charred homes he saw, the smaller his other problems seemed.

The Glass fire had destroyed 120 homes in Sonoma County -- a number sure to rise as Cal Fire's inspection teams complete their work -- by late Friday night. Taking the brunt of that firestorm in Sonoma were many of the houses along Los Alamos, which wends five sinuous miles from Highway 12 to the north entrance of Hood Mountain Regional Park.

"It's an amazing road," said former Santa Rosan Levi Leipheimer, who during his professional bike racing career often could be seen accelerating up the steep pitches of Los Alamos -- "the one right after Cougar Lane, that's gotta be 15%" -- then turning around and repeating the climb, over and over and over.

Los Alamos reminds him of some of the ascents in the three-week Tour of Spain: "uneven, really pitchy, steep."

The road is different things to different people. This is a story of an alluring and sometimes treacherous passage, an account of who lives there, who lived there and what it meant to people before everything around it caught fire.

'A lot of history in this place'

"Look at Wildwood Trail, holy crap," Rhinehart exclaimed, riding along with a reporter. The fire had singed a vineyard to the right -- property owned by the Rowe family. "I went to high school with Chuck Rowe. He was a senior when I was a sophomore."

Asked the next day how his property had fared during the fire, Rowe replied: "It's frickin' toast." He and a friend, Kenny Caven, saved a dozen pieces of farm equipment by putting them in the middle of the vineyard Sunday night.

"Pretty much everything else burnt down," Rowe said.

The lost structures included "the big house," which was completed in 1923 and served at the time as the Rincon Valley Grange Hall. "It was the only place big enough to have dances. Floorboards were 1 1/4 -inch oak," he said.

A second house was built with timbers salvaged in Forestville by his father, Harold, when he returned from World War II.

When the family sat down to dinner, Chuck Rowe recalled, "if you heard a car going up the hill, you looked up and you knew who they were. That's how few people lived" then on Los Alamos Road. But "there's a lot of history in this place."

According to Rowe family lore, workers were budding a vineyard on the property -- the one visible from Los Alamos -- when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit.

On Sunday, he and Caven worked past midnight to save equipment and structures. "At that point the fire was in the creek below us, maybe 200 feet away," Rowe recalled.

"I said Kenny, if you want to live, we gotta go."

"Man, I never thought this would happen."

Death of a tradition

The road is often stunning, sometimes menacing, with stretches of it carved out of the mountainside. How steep are its canyons? Chuck Rhinehart, Keith's father, moved into the area in 1959. He rented a cottage from Dick Violetti, the Rincon Valley fire chief. That cottage later slid down the hillside.

Rhinehart was a professor at the Santa Rosa extension of San Francisco State University, which later became Sonoma State University. After renting for a couple years from Wynn Corrick, he and his young family moved into their dream house, a giant A-frame at 1475 Los Alamos.

"My parents loved the chalet look," said Keith Rhinehart, who, after an adjustment period, came to embrace this rural life. Often he played "Army" with his brother, Dale, each wielding plastic toy M1 rifles. The family kept geese, ducks, chickens, hogs, sheep, even a Palomino quarter horse or two.

They butchered geese for Thanksgiving, but mostly, Rhinehart said, laughing, "they became pets. After awhile, we couldn't stomach killing them."

Dropped off by the school bus at the bottom of the hill, the brothers would hike the 2 miles home, and weren't bashful about sticking their thumbs out. Among the kind souls who sometimes gave them a lift was Ruth Nicholson, in her distinctive, 1951 metallic forest green station wagon. The family preserved that barge-like Plymouth until Sunday night, when it was one of half a dozen vintage cars that burned at 1932 Los Alamos Road.

"They're all gone," said Eric Worden, a grandson of the late Ruth and Al Nicholson. Worden now owns the property.

His grandfather was a merchant for Toledo Scales, which in the 1930s bought this spread across Los Alamos from a rock outcropping whose outline, if you look closely, sort of resembles an eagle.

The Nicholsons were renowned for hosting Thanksgiving parties that drew scores of people -- an 87-year-old tradition that will end next month. That main house, with its koi pond and vast curved window looking out on the valley, could not be saved.

The only people on the premises that Sunday night were Eric's son, Corey, and Corey's wife, Kelli. After dinner, they took a drive up Los Alamos, past the fork where Holst Lane splits off to the left, over the first of two cattle grates. They were doing their own reconnaissance -- "to see if the fire was coming closer to us."

From that vantage, they saw a new fire, to the left of the main fire. This one was smaller, but much closer, and seemed to be coming their way.

Back home, Corey turned on his scanner, and heard dispatchers sending all available units to Sonoma County.

"That's not good," he said.

The last thing Eric Worden saw on his security camera were "fist-sized balls of fire" flying toward the house, "and then the power went out."

Pioneers on Los Alamos

In addition to serving on the Sonoma State faculty for 35 years, Chuck Rhinehart was an environmentalist and activist. He was a founder of Californians Organized to Acquire Access to State Tidelands. Closer to home, he started the group that battled, unsuccessfully, to keep PG&E from building giant transmission towers taking electricity from the Geysers to Oakmont.

As progressives, the Rhineharts were pleased by the arrival, in the late 1950s, of some pioneering new neighbors. Willie Garrett and his wife, Ida Mae, became the first Black family on the hill -- big news at the time.

Housing options for Black people in Santa Rosa were limited in those days, the result of overt discrimination which, before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was legal. Though the couple had saved up to buy a property, they struggled to find a house.

"I don't know how many places I went to with money in my pocket, to buy a house," Garrett told the radio station KRCB in 2009. "And once they saw me, that house had just been sold."

"It was back in those days when a Black man didn't buy property on Los Alamos Road," Garrett's longtime friend and local activist, Mary Moore, told The Press Democrat in 2019. "They had to go through hell to buy the place."

Finally, they found a seller willing to work with them. That house, two-thirds of the way up Los Alamos, commanded sweeping views of the Sonoma and Rincon valleys. The home purchase had to be kept secret until escrow closed, recalled Keith Rhinehart, "because apparently no one wanted Blacks in our neighborhood."

A prominent leader in Sonoma County's civil rights movement, Garrett served as president of the local NAACP chapter, and helped start the Community Baptist Church -- a landmark institution for Santa Rosa's African American community.

In 1962, Garrett staged a sit-in, along with half a dozen other Black men, at a Fourth Street Bar called the Silver Dollar. They came in after the owner had repeatedly refused to serve Black men and women. After being refused service, they sued the bar owner for discrimination and won.

As they got older, Willie and Ida Garrett made their children promise they'd let them live the rest of their lives in that hard-earned house on Los Alamos. Ida died there in 2016. Willie Garrett passed three years later, at the age of 90.

"Despite the odds, they were able to (buy that property)," their daughter, Alicia Dasso, told The Press Democrat in August 2019. "And every day (my dad) got to get out on his deck and see the amazing view, and that's what he was able to do on the very last day of his life."

'We knew we were in trouble'

Sebastopol Fire Battalion Chief Jack Piccinini spent Sunday in charge of a strike team battling the Glass fire in the Napa Valley. Around 6 p.m., they noticed a pair of spot fires off St. Helena Road. Piccinini drove to investigate the closer one, which he soon discovered was "a hundred-plus acres, and well established in the timber. The wind had caught it, and it was on the move."

"I had a pretty good sense it was going to hit Sonoma County, one way or the other," he said.

Soon after, his strike team was speeding back toward Santa Rosa. Meeting at the Safeway supermarket at Calistoga Road and Highway 12, Piccinini noticed "it was very windy, and still very warm. We knew we were in trouble."

Minutes later, they started getting calls from residents on Los Alamos.

Heading up the narrow road, they saw many residents fleeing in the other direction. Before long, Piccinini said, "we had fire on both sides of us." Their first priority was to assist in te evacuation. Some people, understandably, were quite stressed.

In one case, a county sheriff's deputy and a firefighter helped a man change a flat tire on his travel trailer. The fire was creeping over the hill, toward his house, and he was blocking his own driveway.

"It was like, 'Hey, we gotta get this thing moved so we can get up there and save your house,'" the battalion chief recalled.

Some residents, underestimating the danger, were reluctant to leave, forcing sheriff's deputies to stage rescues along Los Alamos. "Unfortunately, we did have some people that stayed behind and might have been burned in some areas," said Sgt. Juan Valencia on Monday.

Deputies were "going back up to Los Alamos Road after people were refusing to leave and rescuing people out of their homes."

With the fire essentially surrounding them, perimeter control was not an option, Piccinini said. His team focused instead on defending as many structures as possible, with five engines and one water tender.

"We did the best we could, and actually had some really good saves," he said. "We got engines in place, did a lot of good prep -- cutting away flammable vegetation -- and beat back the flames with hose streams."

There were other homes they tried to save, to no avail. "The winds were just too much."

'It's gone'

As he drew to within a half mile of his family's property Wednesday, Keith Rhinehart had less to say. "This sucks, man. I'm scared."

With good reason. After a sweeping left turn just past Cougar Lane, his gaze went up to the promontory where the family home long stood.

"OK" he said, resigned at first. "It's gone."

Next came a wave of stronger emotions: "F---! It's gone. See the fireplace? That's all that's left."

His mother, Lillian, was down in Santa Rosa, unaware of the awful news. He spoke to her then, though she could not hear him:

"Mom, I'm so sorry."

Lillian is 93 and still drives a car. His father died in that house 12 years ago. "She was going to be here until the end," Rhinehart said.

Now on foot, he took a lap around the ruins, taking pictures and video for insurance purposes. A second, smaller house was also leveled. After grieving on Lillian's behalf, he let himself lament his own losses, including "15 beautiful guitars -- all Gibsons."

He stood before the chimney, made of stones gathered from nearby fields. Speaking more to the fireplace than anyone else, he vowed:

"I'm gonna rebuild this sucker."

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88

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