How some lost their homes — and almost their lives — in the Hay River wildfire

Sandra Lester calls Peace River, Alta., the most hospitable town she's ever been to. Still, after a month living in a hotel room there, she wants to get back to Hay River, N.W.T., this weekend. 

"I want to go home," she told CBC News before the weekend.

"I don't even have a home to go to, and I want to go home."

Lester lost her home when a wildfire ripped through the Paradise Gardens and Patterson Road areas, just south of Hay River, last month.

So as residents of Hay River finally return this weekend after a month-long evacuation, Lester is among those in the area who have lost everything, and don't know exactly what they're returning to.   

Her home was near the Patterson sawmill, a business founded south of Hay River in the 1960s by her late father and later taken over by her brother Daniel. Lester, 74, has lived in that area almost all her life. She and her late husband built their own Patterson Road home in 1983 and raised three daughters there.

It's all gone now — the small cluster of homes on Patterson Road including Lester's, the sawmill, and the vast piles of firewood that were to heat homes throughout the South Slave region this winter. 

Still, Lester could have lost more. She barely escaped with her life.

She was at home that day, Aug. 13, when the fire seemed to appear almost out of nowhere. She had been told it was still many kilometres away and believed there was no real urgency as she packed up some things to be ready to leave. 

Lester recalled how she was still putting stuff in a suitcase when she looked out the window and saw fire moving down the hill nearby. She watched trees in her yard go up like torches and her porch start to burn as she scrambled to get to her truck. She had to drive across the lawn to escape because a tree had already fallen across the driveway. 

"By the time I got up onto Patterson Road, it was pitch black and you couldn't see. The smoke was just horrendously black," she recalled.

Her brother Daniel, who runs the sawmill, had earlier told her he was going to bring his camper down to the river in case things got bad. The river has been extraordinarily low this summer so you could drive right out onto the riverbed, hopefully far enough from anything that would burn.

Lester decided to head to the river but was having a hard time finding her way through the smoke. She kept driving into the ditch.

That's when her brother's lights appeared in her rearview mirror. She ended up following him down onto the riverbed, right to the water's edge. They sat there for the next couple of hours watching the fire roar along the banks and eventually jump the river in front of them.