Haha that’s the fun part… planning ahead wouldn’t have mattered, there aren’t any alternate routes. There are only two roads out of town, 63 and 881, and you have to take 63 to get to 881 which effectively made it only a single exit point for nearly 100,000 people. 881 had a tragic accident during the evac too, the only casualties from the whole event. 10 years later and still nothing’s changed either. Hell the current govt won’t even fix the potholes to make the highway we do have properly drivable. It was an incredibly hot fire, just terrifying. We were told we’d be fine because there was a whole river to separate the fire from town… and then overnight it jumped the river. When the fire in the picture happened a couple years ago people were pretty on edge because we remember how unpredictable it was. A good amount of people actually did evacuate as a precaution (a couple areas closest to the fire did get called for evac too.) The rest of us had our bags packed ready to go just in case. I sent my horse south with a few others so that I wouldn’t have to worry about evacuating both myself and finding a ride for her if it came to it. We can also add in the flood in 2020 that left parts of downtown under several feet of water and did a massive amount of damage. Then the insane blizzard we had just a couple months ago that left hundreds stranded on the highway for almost two days (I made it through safely myself but only by driving 50kph in 4wd most of the way. It was almost scarier than driving through the wildfire smoke.) This place is incredible and beautiful but nature fights back hard.