Showing Beyond the Flames: A Family Touched by Fire by Heather Smith Thomas

Wildflowers have returned to the rangeland around Salmon, Idaho, making it hard to recall the charred landscape left by the Clear Creek fires more than a dozen months prior. Thick smoke shrouded the valley as the blaze destroyed everything in its path—timber and buildings and livestock and almost the life of Heather Smith Thomas’s daughter.

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A SUMMER OF FIRE; A TIME OF TESTING

Just before midnight on July 5, 2000, Heather and Lynn Thomas received the phone call that every parent dreads, the call that tells them one of their own has come to harm. “Andrea has been burned,” their neighbor said. “She’s being brought to the hospital by ambulance.”

The Thomases rushed from their ranch via Idaho’s Highway 28 toward Salmon, twelve miles away, not knowing the extent of their daughter’s injuries and unaware they were beginning a journey which would leave them, their family, friends and community forever changed.