Owners of remote B.C. lodge sleeping on barge as wildfire burns nearby

An out-of-control wildfire in the West Chilcotin has the owners of a remote wilderness lodge sleeping on a barge at night to stay safe from the massive blaze burning just a few kilometres away.

“We take it out into the middle of the lake and it’s a safe place. There’s a lot of smoke but we have gas masks so we can breathe,” said Aron Toland, who owns the Eliguk Lake Lodge with his wife Jennifer.

They are worried about the Gatcho Lake fire, which is now estimated to be more than 800 hectares in size. Thick smoke from the blaze can be seen in video Jennifer Toland has been recording and posting on social media.

“When I saw smoke behind us, I put the drone up and saw there was a fire literally on our back mountain to the north. And we realized it was so close,” she said.

The off-grid fishing lodge is about an eight hour drive from the closest community of Vanderhoof on logging roads the Tolands say are no longer safe to travel.

“We had so many lighting storms over several days, hundreds of lighting strikes all around us,” she said.

The couple says they’ve been anxious about how close the fire was moving, but had little luck getting information from B.C. Wildfire Service, which Jennifer Toland said is “stretched to its limits.”

“We had been trying for days to call and get a hold of somebody. They’re so busy. They kept saying someone would call you in 20 minutes and no one did,” she said.

But a worried call Tuesday brought air tankers that dumped fire retardant near the lodge to protect it.

The couple received a call from RCMP late Wednesday morning stating they are now under an evacuation order.

But they said they won’t abandon their animals, which include four Australian shepherd dogs and chickens, and also want to protect the lodge.

“For us to leave and leave all this behind, we’ve invested everything in this place,” Aron Toland said.

“It’s all we have, so our attitudes are, we’re staying to fight the fire,” he explained.

The fight includes setting up sprinklers around the cabins. On Wednesday, he was trying to piece together additional sprinklers by utilizing whatever he could find at his place.

B.C. Wildfire Service said given the remoteness of the lodge, there are no ground crews in the area but work is being done to mobilize some.

Jennifer Toland said she’s urging government to declare a state of emergency in the province as B.C. faces a wildfire crisis.

In the meantime, she and her husband will continue sleeping on the barge, where temperatures dipped to about 3 degrees Tuesday night.