Bret Hadley spent all weekend watching the Rocky Canyon Fire march its way steadily toward his land near Henefer.
He has 60 goats, plus some donkeys, two Highland cows and an alpaca on his 28-acre farm along East Canyon Road.
As the fire approached on Sunday, Aug. 9, Hadley said he knew it was time to start moving the animals.
“We just kind of waited as long as we dared, and then once we felt like it was kind of getting too close, then we started kind of running them all down to the bottom part of the pasture,” he said.
It took over an hour to shepherd them down the hill. The animals were frightened and didn’t want to evacuate, so Hadley’s neighbors and children helped guide them along.
Rhett Richins has worked on his family’s sheep farm since he was a kid. He had horses and sheep in the wildfire’s path.
“Where the firefighters are right now is where those bucks were,” he said.
He and his neighbor herded 1,500 sheep down the mountain Sunday.
“Sunday was my birthday. I was having my birthday party, and then we started running around evacuating animals,” he said. “I had a neighbor who sat there and said, ‘Hey, go blow out your birthday candles up on the hill!’ It was pretty big candles – I couldn’t blow them out.”
The evacuation Sunday wasn’t Richins’ first: he raced to get thousands of sheep out of the Uintas during the Yellow Lake Fire in 2024.
“You can fit around 300 sheep onto a semi, but we had around 15 to 18 semis, and we were just lining up all the neighbors we could to try to get those animals loaded up and out of there,” he remembered.
Hadley, who brought his goats down the mountain, said the community has banded together to support the evacuated farmers and livestock.
“I have a guy over across the freeway that I got some hay from, and we had to get water and get some tubs for them and give them all water, and we got some of them trying to get out,” he said. “With the helicopters and the fire and the smoke, they’ve been kind of uneasy. You could tell they kind of lost weight and was a little stressed, but they’re doing really good now.”
On Wednesday morning, Aug. 12, Hadley and his animals were back on the farm. Helicopters flew overhead to scoop water from a pond behind his house.
The Rocky Canyon Fire sparked Aug. 7 and was burning over 15,600 acres as of Wednesday. It is 25% contained.
Hadley and his wife have been worried about losing their home, which they only finished building a year ago. This is the closest he’s been to a wildfire.
Kelley Adams, who has a small farm along South Henefer Road, had to get dozens of sheep and a litter of newborn puppies to safety.
“It was crazy because we had trailer after trailer – livestock trailers, you know – coming down the lane, and the ash was falling, and the Blackhawks are flying over you, and it just seemed so surreal, like it wasn’t even – felt like a movie,” she said.
Morgan County opened its fairgrounds for evacuated livestock.
It’s not clear when Henefer residents will be allowed to return to their homes.
KPCW’s Ulla-Britt Libre contributed to this report.
