For seven achingly long days, Taylor Makall Chamberlain had no way of knowing if the little cinderblock cabins that have been in her family for generations were still standing.

Each day since the massive Cottonwood Fire ignited near Beaver on June 22, she has oscillated between fear that the beloved complex — last updated in the 1970s, with mustard yellow accents and wood paneling — was reduced to ash and hope that it would still be standing, and she’d soon return, like she does every summer, to swim in the nearby lake.

Last Tuesday, a neighbor to the west posted doorbell camera footage that showed flames edging closer. Chamberlain tried to calculate how many yards away it was and how fast the fire might move. She cried.

By Wednesday, though, someone who had been escorted up to quickly grab some personal belongings said they saw the roof of her place. Chamberlain welcomed a flood of relief.

She anxiously searched every inch of social media she could to find any scraps, any clues, as she waited for official word.

“I was just trying to find any information,” she said. “My brain was spinning.”

By Thursday, the sheriff’s office in the area had let another neighbor know a cabin to the east of the same lake Chamberlain’s family cherished was untouched. She felt cautiously confident again.

It wasn’t until Sunday night that the weeklong emotional seesaw finally came to an end.

“Unfortunately,” Chamberlain said Monday, “we found out.”

The cabins were gone.

The property is among the many presumed destroyed by the growing Cottonwood Fire, which officials have categorized as one of the biggest and most destructive wildfires in Utah history. As of Monday, it had grown to 93,918 acres and was still 0% contained. There has been no official update yet on the number of structures destroyed because the blaze has been too active and hot to broadly assess property.

“There are still folks who aren’t sure if their properties are affected,” confirmed Ashley Farinacci, a spokesperson assigned to the fire.

The Beaver County Sheriff’s Office has been able to conduct a few damage assessments, she said, and authorities have been able to update a few people. But many cabins don’t have addresses and can be hard to recognize if damaged.

It takes time, too, to find the owners, Farinacci said.

“There’s a lot that has to be tracked down,” she noted.

During a community meeting for Beaver residents on Thursday, Nick Schenck, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter and operations section chief on the Cottonwood Fire, added: “We’ve done everything we can to protect every piece of property that’s in the line. … Whatever we can save, we’re saving it.”

Until officials can get in safely to determine what made it, though, the wait and angst continue.

“We still haven’t heard how badly our home was or wasn’t damaged,” one woman wrote in a Facebook comment.

Another added, “We have no idea if our cabin survived. … We don’t have an official outcome as of yet. But it doesn’t look good based on the surrounding community videos.”

‘We had our hopes up’

For Chamberlain, waiting was an agonizing part of an already painful tragedy. Knowing now that the family cabins are lost comes with its own grief, she said, but also a chance for closure.

“We were all just glad to be done wondering, even though it’s the worst outcome,” she said.

Her grandmother first constructed the little getaway in 1950, on 13 acres purchased by the family at a cheap rate after the Great Depression ended.

In those early days, the place looked like it was made of life-sized Lincoln Logs. She said it was one of the first cabins built on Beaver Mountain.

Nothing remains of that first building now. The walls are all gone. Only an old metal stove and oven are recognizable in the rubble.

Over time, the family made some additions to the property. Those are disintegrated now, too. Just warped roofing, cinderblocks and the chimney remain, surrounded by white ash. Two metal swords that once hung above the mantel, which Chamberlain jokingly admits no one really knew where they came from, were also salvaged.

But the sign Chamberlain’s aunt made, inviting family into “Bella Pines” — the name they gave the complex — still sits at the entrance on Kents Lake Road, leading to an otherwise now flattened lot. Every tree in the area is a singed shadow of what used to stand around the lake.

“The whole landscape is totally different,” Chamberlain said. “Even if we rebuild, those trees were 100 years old. They’ll never look the same.”

James Bybee is also unsure what he plans to do with his property after also waiting a week and finally getting confirmation early Monday that his cabin was destroyed.

“Just got a video of it,” he said, “and it’s a pile of rubble.”

Like Chamberlain, he had tried to determine if his cabin was still standing from anything he could find online. He saw one news station post a video of a helicopter flying over the area where he purchased his place a few years ago and spent the last few months working on renovations. But when he tried to zoom in, the footage was too blurry to decipher.

Some cabins on the dirt road by his, he later learned, were fine.

“We’ve been in limbo,” he said. “But we had our hopes up.”

A scope and a sink

Randy Johnson got permission from the sheriff’s office to take a somewhat unconventional approach to see if his cabin remained.

Last Wednesday, authorities allowed him to take a spotting scope — like those used for hunting — up Burnout Canyon south of the fire. He climbed up the ridge to see blackened hills in all directions.

Then, he noticed a patch of green and a rooftop where his cabin was. It was safe.

“I had been like 99% sure it was gone,” Johnson said.

He hasn’t been able to get to his property yet as firefighters continue to battle the Cottonwood Fire, he said, but he’s grateful to know.

Chamberlain said her family wasn’t able to get anything out of the cabin complex before the blaze. She thinks about an old guest book left there, with a hand-carved wood cover; it had pictures of family reunions dating back to the 1960s.

Over the years, 100 people in her family had come to share the little complex and take turns vacationing there. Many of her cousins carried on a tradition of bathing their babies in the old sink of the original cabin, which had yellow geometric tiles behind it.

Chamberlain remembers washing her 2-year-old son there, and has a photo of him smiling in the basin. She’s pregnant now and choked up thinking about how her youngest won’t be able to.

“It’s just a silly thing like that that meant so much,” she said. “It wasn’t just a building.”

Correction • July 1, 1:24 p.m.: The story has been updated to correct the name of Nick Schenck, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter and operations section chief on the Cottonwood Fire.