The Trade-Off for Mountain Tranquility in California? Increasing Fire Risk.

Through the window of her hotel room, Helene Forman monitored the wooded mountainside where encroaching flames Monday threatened her mobile home in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains.

She had just purchased the home last year in Running Springs, a small community about 80 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. She carefully picked out the patio furniture and planted eight giant sunflowers in the front yard, experiencing the joy of becoming a first-time homeowner at age 63.

But over the weekend, the Line fire, a fast-moving blaze that has since grown beyond 23,000 acres and has threatened more than 36,000 structures, forced Forman to evacuate with little more than a few family photos, some clothes and the deed to the house.

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“It would be awful to lose it, now that I’m finally a homeowner,” she said.

The Inland Empire of California has long been a refuge from Los Angeles, offering popular mountain getaways in Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead as well as a more affordable option for Southern California residents to buy homes. The region, which encompasses San Bernardino and Riverside counties, has quadrupled in population over the past 50 years to 4.6 million as generations of homebuyers have been priced out of places closer to the coast.

But migration to once remote areas — especially towns nestled in the mountains or the foothills — has come with risks in an era of climate change.

Just 18 months ago, Forman stayed in the same hotel in Highland, California, where she is currently holed up, when a record-breaking snowstorm trapped residents in her community in the San Bernardino Mountains for days without power or access to food or help. During the blizzard, which was known locally as Snowmageddon, 13 people died, according to a review months later by the Los Angeles Times.

The ferocious precipitation of the past two winters, not to mention a direct hit from a rare tropical storm in 2023, helped set the stage for a devastating fire season in California this summer, especially in the San Bernardino Mountains.

The rain that soaked the mountains nourished plants and helped them grow abundantly. Those same plants then became dangerously parched during multiple heat waves this summer, including a stretch that began several days ago in Southern California.

Communities in and around the San Bernardino Mountains were primed for wildfire, said Dave Munyan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in San Diego. “Unfortunately, because they get the most precipitation they get the most vegetation,” he added.

The Inland Empire largely consisted of agricultural communities and citrus farms until the steel and aerospace industries flourished there after World War II, fueling a population boom. Today, lower-cost homes are a major draw for people; the median sale price in San Bernardino County in July was $534,000, roughly half that in Los Angeles County, according to real estate services company Redfin.

The recent rise of e-commerce has also brought an influx of warehouses into the San Bernardino Valley, where the risks of fires are lower, making it more likely for newcomers to reside in the mountain areas, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and an analyst of demographic and policy trends in the state.

In June, the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, the region’s governing body, passed a resolution asking the state to declare a state of emergency for the disaster-prone area. Insurers have increasingly abandoned their region, and supervisors said that the inability of homeowners to get fire coverage was becoming a crisis.

Ricky Garcia and Beth Walsh relocated 30 years ago to the San Bernardino Mountains from Thousand Oaks, a pricey suburb about 40 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Despite evacuation orders, the couple stayed in their house in Running Springs on Monday, reluctant to leave a home that was damaged by wildfire once before in 2007.

They said they felt they were still enough out of harm’s way that they could safely flee if things grew worse. And their anxiety would be higher not knowing if their home had survived than it is at the moment staying put, they added.

“We’re packed and ready to go, if things change,” said Garcia, 52. “But we couldn’t risk not knowing, from the last fires. It’s been devastating. So to us, it’s worth the risk.”

By Monday, schools were closed, and 11,000 residents had been ordered to leave as the Line fire continued to grow, filling the sky with smoke. The haze appeared much thicker than it was Sunday, and people well outside San Bernardino County, as far as 40 miles away in parts of neighboring Riverside County, could smell smoke.

The fire, which began Thursday, was 3% contained as of Monday afternoon. Jake Rodriguez, a public information officer with the Forest Service, said that firefighters’ efforts were complicated by difficult topography and high temperatures.

Some good news was coming, however: Temperatures are expected to begin dropping Tuesday and then fall further Wednesday. Rodriguez said firefighters might get a better handle on the fire as weather conditions improved, but that the blaze would still last a while because it was burning in areas that were hard to reach.

“I don’t want to give any illusions that this is getting wrapped up,” he said. “We’re in the heat of the battle still, for sure.”

On Monday morning, Nick Tolerico, 27, an online food and candy salesman, stood with his girlfriend Angelique McClain, 24, just up the street from his mother’s house in Highland, near where the Line fire started in the hills above Aplin and Baseline streets. The city of 55,000 has dense clusters of suburban homes along the foothills of the mountains, and fire crews have been intent on keeping the flames out of those neighborhoods.

The couple watched as some firefighters dowsed hot spots and smoke emanated from smoldering brush nearby.

Several generations of Tolerico’s family have lived in Highland, even before the city was incorporated in 1987. He said that living in the foothills of the mountains came with its perils, but he loved it there.

“It’s an OK trade-off for the peace and quiet away from the city and just like a better community,” Tolerico said.

Diana Nelson, a school psychologist, has watched as the flames have gobbled up hillsides near her home in Highland. The mountain views were one reason that she and her husband bought a property there in 2007.

The views from the home, especially for her husband, who has since passed away, were an “end to the Southern California madness,” Nelson, 50, said. “It has been great to live here.”

“This is heartbreaking,” she said as she stood on her porch Monday and looked at blackened foothills as far as the eye could see. “But this is the cost, right?”

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