Steve Hawkins’ family has owned their mountain cabin in Baker County for more than half a century, but he knows well that it could be turned into ashes in the span of a summer afternoon.

Hawkins, who lives in Baker City, is well acquainted with wildfires.

He retired a few years ago after a career in fire management for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

The same publicly owned forest that borders the ghost town of Bourne, along Cracker Creek about 6 miles north of Sumpter, where Hawkins’ cabin stands, along with 24 others.

Hawkins worked with some neighboring property owners to have Bourne designated as a Firewise Community through the National Fire Protection Association.

The program is designed to help residents in places susceptible to wildfires — known as the “wildland-urban interface” — work together to clear brush, improve access to fire trucks and take other steps to try to protect their properties from flames.

“It’s definitely a high-risk area,” Hawkins said on Monday, May 12. “There’s one way in, one way out.”

Bourne also lacks cell service, he said, although T-Mobile customers can send and receive text messages from the area.

Property owners in Firewise Communities often have an advantage in applying for state and federal grants to help with work to reduce the fire risk, said Jana Peterson, stewardship forester at the Oregon Department of Forestry’s Baker City office.

Peterson helps property owners navigate the Firewise Community application and seek grants to help with projects that can protect their homes from fire.

Bourne is the second new Firewise Community in Baker County over the past couple weeks, and the county’s sixth overall, Peterson said.

The other is on the north side of Unity Lake in southern Baker County, an area that includes about 35 homes, a mixture of permanent and vacation dwellings.

The cabins at Bourne are all used primarily during the summer, Hawkins said, as there are no year-round residents at the historic townsite.

Bourne was founded near the North Pole-Columbia Lode, one of the richer gold-mining districts in Oregon during its heyday in the first couple decades of the 20th century. The Bourne post office was established in 1895 and closed in 1927.

Baker County’s first Firewise Community became official in 2020. It includes more than 130 properties on the west side of Baker Valley and is known as Spring Creek, for one of several streams in the area that flow east out of the Elkhorn Mountains.

The county’s other designated communities:

• Pine Valley, which includes much of the area on the edges of Pine Valley, west and north of Halfway, that border the Wallowa-Whitman.

• Eagleton, which includes several seasonal cabins along East Eagle Creek in the Wallowa Mountains.

• Floodwater Flats, the tract of cabins built on the Wallowa-Whitman near Anthony Lakes Ski Area.

Peterson said property owners in two other areas are also pursuing Firewise Community designation and could be approved soon:

• Old Auburn Lane, about 10 miles southwest of Baker City.

• Western Heights, just west of Baker City.

Peterson said she’s not surprised by the level of interest in the Firewise Community program, given the severe wildfire seasons over the past several years, including 2024, when more than 350,000 acres burned in Baker County.

She’s encouraged by the trend.

“I’d like to see double digit numbers of Firewise Communities in the county,” Peterson said on Monday, May 12. “It really brings landowners together.”

That cooperation is crucial both in forming communities and in getting work done on the ground, Peterson said.

She said she can talk with property owners about ways they can protect their homes and land, but she knows that conversations among neighbors can be much more persuasive.

“That has way more impact than I do as a government employee,” Peterson said.

Although participation in Firewise Communities is strictly voluntary, Peterson said she’s seen how Baker County’s communities build momentum, as property owners replicate their neighbors’ work to take relatively simple steps such as trimming trees and brush, keeping grass well-watered and moving firewood away from homes.

Bourne

Cooperation among neighbors is especially vital in Bourne, Hawkins said, because most of the cabins are on lots of either 5,000 or 2,500 square feet.

With such close quarters, neighbors have to work together, he said, to make meaningful progress in reducing their fire risk by trimming trees or clearing brush.

Besides that type of work, Hawkins said he has talked with some of his neighbors about installing a water tank to store water from a spring, and potentially put in a hydrant to ensure water is available in case of fire.

He said all the cabins have metal roofs, which can help protect a home from embers.

Hawkins said he will encourage cabin owners to install metal screens around the base of their buildings, which can keep wind-blown embers from getting beneath a cabin and setting it on fire.

Peterson said property owners in the county’s other Firewise Communities have strived to take advantage of the designation in protecting their homes.

In Spring Creek, for instance, Gayle Combs, who was involved from the start in creating the county’s first such community, gets in touch with new residents to let them know about the program and its benefits.

Many new homes have been built in that area since Spring Creek earned its designation in 2020, Peterson said.

She said Combs has also arranged to have students from Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario help clear combustible material from near homes.

In Pine Valley, Debi Lorence has done the same thing working with the Northwest Youth Corps to bring crews to that area.

Peterson urges people interested in the Firewise Community program to call her or Danielle Weaver at 541-523-5831.

More information about Firewise Communities in Northeastern Oregon is available at www.neoregonfirewise.org/baker-county.