We evacuated out of Slave Lake May 15 at about 7:30 PM. By that time of day the Mitsue Lake fire had roared through our subdivision jumped the creeks,drainage ditchs,fire breaks, Hwy 88 and hit smack dab into the middle of SE Slave Lake. When we left town we could hear cars exploding like popcorn.That was the connection I made, while standing 400m away on the only remaining piece of ground (or so it seemed at the time) that was safe to be on.Earlier in the afternoon we had tried driving westerly out of town towards High Prairie but the fire that had been working its way north over Grizzly Ridge had accelerated incredibly.There were wind speeds of over 100 km per hr driving all the fires in Alberta that day.
We were in a very long line of cars that was being led by an RCMP cruiser. When we reached Canyon Creek and entered their Fire Storm, the fire had crossed the highway and was burning in both ditchs, the smoke was so thick, we couldn`t see more than 3 or 4 vehicles in front of us. Everyone had their flashers and headlights on because it was like nightime in the middle of the afternoon.The RCMP cruiser immediately u-turned and headed back towards Slave Lake. Just down the road he redirected us onto the old Alaska Hwy trail which follows along the SouthShore of Lesser Slave Lake, I imagine this was so we wouldn`t be on the same road as the rest of the traffic that had been behind us.
The cars and trucks were fine to u-turn but there were several trailers and fifth wheels that had been in that
traffic line that couldn`t turn around on a dime like we could.As we were travelling easterly now back to Slave Lake driving through the communitys of Widewater and Wagner that had just recently been evacuated I was so far in thought that when a HUGE monster Spruce Tree blew over onto the road between Marilyns truck and my truck I just went around it and drove over the top of the tree like this was a bloody JEEP commercial. I had no thought whatsoever of doing this and if Marilyn hadn`t mentioned it later I would probably not even thought a lick about it. Eventually we got back to Slave Lake and watched the fires for another hour wondering if we were trapped here like rats in a cage. Many people were starting to get on the highway and were driving easterly and NOT coming back like before. We took that as a sign that the highway was open and we beelined it straight through to Barrhead and Thunder Lake. We saw many people lined up on the side of the road and only discovered later it was probably because they had no gas. All the gas stations had been shut down. We had filled up on Saturday night (just in case) so we were fine. Many were not so lucky. Amazingly the only casualty was when a fire bomber helicopter went down into the lake on May 20-2011.
My Flickr has some photos and a video I took. I actually have about 100 photos and 30 videos but these are some that are fine. I spent 4 days in the town May 18 until the 22nd setting signs with municipal addresses for the RCMP and Town so they could tell which basement and rubble pile belonged to whom. I understand they are taking busloads of home owners through the devastation so they can start the process. There were still small hot spots Saturday afternoon when I was finishing up.
