The night Samantha Garcia moved into her apartment above the Canyonside Lodge at Eagle Point Resort, she dreamed she was on “Wheel of Fortune.” Upon awakening, the ski area’s new marketing director realized the incessant ticking of the spinning wheel was actually a woodpecker tapping away at a light post outside her window.
Six months later, fortune wasn’t in Garcia’s favor.
On June 22, the Cottonwood Fire tore through Beaver Canyon. In its first 24 hours, it burned 12,000 acres, including the Canyonside Lodge and most of what Garcia owned. Fire officials have said 145 families in the canyon lost a home to the blaze — Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called it “one of the most destructive” in state history — and half the ski area’s 600 acres burned.
On Thursday, Eagle Point owner Shane Gadbaw, general manager Tanner Larsen, Garcia and a handful of law enforcement officers, along with city, county and fire officials, surveyed the damage to the resort and surrounding areas. The lodge, one of the small resort’s two hubs, had been reduced to a blackened heap. Two giant kitchen vents rose like claws out of the rubble. The wide, concrete stairs — still guarded by their metal rails — that once led to the general store now end in a view of the sooty, scarred hillside that used to shelter Eagle Point’s steepest runs.
Next to those stairs, though, the woodpecker’s light post was still standing. Someday, Gadbaw promised, the resort will, too.
Read the full article by Julie Jag at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.