Since Michelle Thorley’s great-grandfather built their modest A-frame cabin by hand, it has stood tucked into City Creek Canyon near Junction, Utah, for four generations.

This week, from her Utah County home three hours away, she learned the Cottonwood Fire scorching the canyons east of Beaver had burned it to the ground.

“I’m having a hard time accepting everything’s gone and the reality of what that means,” Thorley said after seeing video a family member sent her of the cabin’s charred remains.

Only the cement pillar stilts of the cabin’s foundation were still standing in ash.

“It was a memory keeper,” Thorley said. “She feels like a family member, like that matriarch that holds everybody together as families get older, but you still come together because the matriarch brings you together. That’s what the cabin was.”

Since igniting on Monday, the Cottonwood Fire has burned more than 70,000 acres, more than twice the size of San Francisco proper, damaging structures at Eagle Point ski resort and threatening hundreds of nearby cabins, homes and condos.

Gov. Spencer Cox has said he believes the wildfire may be the “most destructive” on record, in terms of property loss.

But authorities won’t be able to formally assess damage until they can access burn zones, which can’t happen while the fire remains highly active, according to a Beaver County notice.

Scrambling to save what they could

When the Cottonwood Fire began racing down City Creek Canyon on Tuesday afternoon, Andy Anderson, a relative of Thorley’s, hurried to his family’s property, hoping to save what he could before the flames arrived.

The fire had doubled in size overnight, and Anderson, who lives in nearby Junction, knew there wasn’t much time. He called a cousin in St. George, who arrived with only minutes to spare before they had to leave the family property behind.

Together, they grabbed what they could, and Anderson focused on clearing out a small museum on the property that housed pieces of the family’s history. Among the items they managed to save was a collection of wooden birds that Thorley’s great-grandfather had carved by hand, she said.

The family property spans 11 acres and includes five cabins, including Thorley’s, and a pavilion, Anderson said. Surrounded by Utah Division of Wildlife Resources land, he said it’s the only privately owned property on that side of the canyon.

“Our property was homesteaded a long time ago, and my grandfather’s two brothers purchased it in the 1940s I believe,” Anderson said, “and so it’s been kind of the fulcrum of our family.”

When the blaze charged down, Anderson said fire crews tried to hold it back as long as they could, but “it was just too powerful, and they were overwhelmed with it.”

‘Our Solitude’

As family members grew up and moved apart, the beloved property — known as Cougar Ranch — became the one place they consistently returned to.

Thorley said her family, working-class Utahns who have lived in the state for generations, treated its upkeep as a shared responsibility. They rotated who kept track of scheduled trips and oversaw tasks so no one person carried the burden.

In the first week of August, each year since the 1960s, all of them poured into the property like clockwork to relax and reconnect. This year’s gathering will look a lot different, Anderson said.

Before the blaze, Thorley’s dark-green, A-frame cabin sat tucked among the trees. A sign atop read, “Cougar Ranch, Our Solitude.”

Rain would rattle against the tin roof overhead while, inside, a cast-iron stove, a handful of “old bed frames” and a kitchen table lit by a lone Coleman lantern gave the cabin its simple charm, she recalled.

On summer evenings, Thorley said, the sound of cards hitting the table blended with joyful conversation as her aunts and uncles stayed up late, playing into the night.

Up in the loft, the kids always scrambled for sleeping space — though it rarely stayed comfortable for long.

“It always got too hot up there, so you’d eventually, like, come down or throw all your blankets off,” she said. “It’s a terrible place to sleep, but as a kid, it was magical.”

Those moments will live on in memory, Thorley and Anderson said.

“It’s a legacy that hurts almost as much as if somebody died,” Anderson said.