Cascade of Flames

“You will feel the fire!”
—Peggy Sanders, author of The Civilian Conservation Corps In and Around the Black Hills.

At one minute to seven on the evening of July 7, 2007, after seven years of drought in the Southern Black Hills of South Dakota, lightning struck in Alabaugh Canyon, directly below a new development of twenty-seven homes on the top of the canyon. The canyon was overgrown with tall grasses and brittle-dry ponderosa pines and cedar trees. Many of the homes were nestled among trees,...