Back in the summer of 1978, I was writing for one of Moonshine Ink’s illustrious predecessors, the High Sierra Times. California was enduring a third dry year in a row and a record number of wildfires. My editor suggested I talk to a woman named Lane Endicott, who was supposed to know something about the Donner Ridge fire of 1960, or as locals called it then, the “Donner Burn.” It had been the most destructive wildfire to ever hit the Truckee/Tahoe area, and everyone was wondering when something like it would happen again.
That’s how I ended up one afternoon bouncing up the Dog Valley Road in a little 2WD Datsun pickup, listening to my passenger tell her story.
In 1960, Lane Endicott was 49 years old. It was her sixth summer living on 8,448-foot Verdi Peak, in a one-room wooden shed with 360-degree picture windows overlooking Reno and the canyons and valleys draining into the Truckee River. She worked as a fire spotter, part of a network of U.S. Forest Service personnel and volunteers operating 50 lookouts on summits up and down the Sierra. From June to September or later, these solitary guardians spent their waking hours watching for the tiny, far-off wisps of smoke that can, in a matter of hours, erupt into out-of-control infernos.
“They were about to close the Verdi lookout until I came along,” Endicott said into my tape recorder that day, as we ground our way in second and third gear up to the peak. “The man they had there before me couldn’t see a thing, but I started spotting lightning fires all over the place my very first summer. Why, if that forest service had moved fast enough, they could have stopped lots of fires sooner than they did, but their attitude was usually ‘let’s wait and see.’ Dollars and cents, I guess. That’s what it comes down to.”
The Donner Ridge fire started on Friday, Aug. 20, 1960, while Caltrans workers were completing the final stretch of Interstate 80 above Donner Lake. Working at the base of what is now called Johnson Canyon, they were bulldozing slashed vegetation into piles when an accidental spark ignited a fire that must have smoldered unseen until the crew had moved on elsewhere.
“I remember that morning,” Endicott told me. “We had a new clerk-dispatcher by the name of Joyce, and since the fire control officer and most of the other higher-ups were off at other fires across the state, she was in charge. I was looking out at that ridge north of Donner Lake and saw a curl of smoke right at the top. I radioed Joyce, and she ordered all units to get up there on the double. But most of the men were in Truckee having lunch, their trucks parked outside with the radios turned up. She kept calling and calling for over an hour, getting no response. Finally, an old fireman named Doc got on the radio saying hold on, he’d go take a look. I guess the boys weren’t about to move too fast with some new gal yelling at them to hurry. But Joyce, she never took back her all-units alert and she was technically in command. Anyway, it wasn’t long before old Doc started hollering for everybody to come help him. He sure sounded excited. ‘I can’t hold it, Joyce, I can’t hold it! She’s beginning to roll!’ He just kept on yelling and yelling, but it was already too late.”
Within a few hours the winds were gusting up to 60 mph or more, starting spot fires as far as 4 miles ahead of the main blaze. It took 3,000 firefighters, 85 bulldozers, 67 tanker trucks, half a dozen helicopters, five air tankers, and over a week to contain the fire. It ravaged the upper slopes of what is now Tahoe Donner, burned through Sagehen Creek, jumped Highway 89, and raged through Stampede, Sardine, and Dog valleys, destroying over 45,000 acres of the Tahoe and Toiyabe national forests, numerous ranches, four power lines, and hundreds of years of priceless natural resources and indigenous history. Total cost to taxpayers, including subsequent erosion control and reforestation, was well over $20 million in today’s dollars.
Biking up Alder Creek, skiing in Euer Valley, or driving north on Highway 89, you can still imagine the devastated hillsides, framed with neat but patchy rows of the so-called “penny pines” donated by California garden clubs to later restoration efforts. But most of the newer trees are small compared to the big timber of the past.
“We do have a forest back,” said former Truckee District ranger Joanne Roubique, “but not the same forest.”
I can still hear the passion in Endicott’s voice as she described the years she’d spent guarding those precious forests, only to have a good part of her western vista go up in flames. “It was sickening, just a shameful waste,” she said.
The approximately 55-mile Donner Burn perimeter was held pretty much right at the Nevada state line. Fifty years later, volunteer firefighter Joe Straub told local historian Norm Sayler about watching it burn unchecked to the east.
“It was full-blown and full-grown,” he recalled. “Trees were bursting into flames. It was pretty hairy for a while. We didn’t know if it would go into Truckee or not.”
Choked by the smoke, northern Nevada endured a multi-day power blackout. At night, Reno residents saw flames cresting the ridges to the west. Skip Wagner was 10 years old then, living in Sparks.
“What sticks in my mind,” he said, “is driving north on 395 and seeing the red glow of the fire.”
That momentous day in 1960 was Lane Endicott’s last on Verdi Peak. But there’s a little more to her story that, for some reason or other, she didn’t tell me, or maybe I just don’t remember, now that those tape cassettes have long since disintegrated. But it seems she wasn’t alone up there.
Forty-six years after our interview, what I now know is this: Delilah Docia “Lane” Endicott grew up on a ranch in Kingsgate, British Columbia, deep in the Canadian Rockies. There she roamed the great outdoors, hunting and fishing and running trap lines for her family. At age 19 she married and moved with her husband to Bellingham, Washington. They had two daughters, Miriam in 1932 and Marybeth in 1937.
By 1938, Endicott was divorced and living with her daughters in Southern California. She studied aviation engineering and performed pre-flight inspections on medium and heavy bombers during World War II. She moved to the Sacramento Valley in the mid-1950s and started working for the forest service, first as a clerk-typist, and before long as the first female USFS employee to wear a uniform. When she requested a posting to Verdi Peak, according to a 1959 profile in Desert Magazine, her male co-workers laid bets that, within two weeks, “Mrs. Endicott would come back to civilization.” But like other creative souls inspired by living in fire lookouts — Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Ed Abbey, and Norman MacLean come to mind — she loved it up there.
Endicott told one interviewer that she spent much of the summer in her “glass cabin” reading the Bible, which she found “thrillingly alive.” She dabbled in writing fiction. According to a 1958 Reno Evening Gazette story, she had a portable organ and composed ballads with titles like “Call of the Wilderness” and “Dawn on the Mountains.”
In those days, many lookouts were staffed by husband-and-wife teams, and almost every mention of Lane Endicott describes her as a solo fire spotter. The Evening Gazette referred to her as “the petite brunette … Miss Endicott, who single-handedly mans the Verdi lookout.”
However, in the December 2015 Truckee-Donner Historical Society newsletter, historian Heidi Sproat recounted “a helicopter rescue of a mother and daughter stranded at Verdi Peak Lookout.” Was there someone with her on that fateful day?
If so, it was almost certainly Endicott’s younger daughter, Marybeth, who by 1960 had separated from her first husband, with whom she’d had a son. It likely wasn’t Miriam, who was living in South Carolina at the time, married to a college professor, and “a homemaker raising their two boys,” as her 2012 obituary put it.
A few questions remain, such as the whereabouts of Marybeth’s son, who couldn’t have been more than 10, and whether she was on an ill-timed visit to her mother when the fire started, or else had been staying there all summer, and maybe a summer or two before that, newly single and refiguring her life.
In 1981, Marybeth married World War II veteran Archie Morse at a Virginia City wedding chapel, and went on to raise his four children and her son in Elk Grove. She died there in 2002, barely a year after her mother. An obituary states that her “impressionable years as a young woman were spent at Sierra Nevada lookout stations.”
What went through the minds of mother and daughter as the fire suddenly exploded at them from the west, thick smoke shrouding their Sierra vista and turning the sunset a deep, bloody red? I regret not asking Lane Endicott this, and many more things as well. What did she do with the remaining quarter-century of her life? I wish I knew.
This summer alone, a higher-than-average number of California wildfires have incinerated nearly a million acres. In 1960, Truckee’s population was 1200. Today it is well over 10 times that, and the surrounding valleys are now thickly settled. The “wait and see” attitude of the 1950s has been replaced by rapid response, and firefighting technology is now far more sophisticated. Still, whenever I remember the deforested, brush-choked Sierra slopes of the mid-’70s, I think of my brief encounter with the remarkable, mysterious Lane Endicott and wonder when, not if, something like the Donner Burn will happen again.
