Safeway Open course rebounds after historic wildfires

Ed Uhlshafer spent most of that Sunday afternoon at Silverado Resort following Phil Mickelson, his favorite golfer and fellow left-hander, during the final round of last year’s Safeway Open.

After the tournament was over, he and his wife Karen dined in downtown Napa. When they returned home, Uhlshafer headed downstairs to the family room and settled in front of the TV to watch the replay of Brendan Steele’s victory.

“You can't see everything while you're out there on the course, so I recorded it so I could watch it later,” he explains.

Meanwhile, Myrna Andrews, one of the Safeway Open’s most valued volunteers, had spent the last three weeks packing gift bags, finalizing details for VIP events and helping find housing for the PGA TOUR players. As the tournament wound down, she finally took time for herself and caught up with her sister and brother-in-law on the North Course for a glass of wine.

“I was enjoying the tournament for a good hour,” Andrews recalls. “It was wonderful.”

Later, she joined some other volunteers at the trophy presentation where they took a group photo with Steele, who had successfully defended his Safeway Open title. She and her husband Jim were toasted for their dedication at the volunteer party that followed before heading home.

“We were exhausted,” Andrews recalls. “We came home, showered up, and literally just went to bed at 10:15.”

Her next-door neighbors Dan and Cindy Dwyer also went to the Safeway Open on Sunday. He’s a senior vice president with Merrill Lynch in Napa and had a skybox at the 18th green.

“We had a great day,” Dwyer says. “Everybody was happy and it was great seeing old friends.”

Being in the brokerage business and living on the West Coast, Dwyer is usually up by 5 a.m. PT. So he and his wife had a light dinner that night and he went to bed.

Then the phone calls started. Uhlshafer also got a knock on his door.

Fueled by hot, dry Diablo winds that at times gusted near hurricane strength, what came to be known as the Atlas Peak fire was barreling over the mountain toward their home.

And the Silverado Resort was located in the crosshairs at 1600 Atlas Peak Rd.

Tournament director Matt McEvoy was having dinner in Napa when a friend who lives at Silverado called, asking him what he knew about the fire. He figured it was something small. Maybe someone had tossed cigarette butts in the trash or a generator had sparked a small blaze.

“What are you talking about?” McEvoy recalls asking.

His friend described the scene: It looks like the fifth green is on fire along with most of the mountain.

McEvoy left the restaurant immediately. He could see an orange line stretching for what appeared to be miles on the hillside.

By the time he got to Silverado, the first responders had already set up a command station on the Mansion lawn where just 24 hours earlier, the Goo Goo Dolls had performed in the finale of the Safeway Open concert series.

McEvoy, who lives in a condo at Silverado, rushed to collect his belongings and find shelter. Resort staff frantically called everyone staying on the property to tell them to evacuate.

“It was definitely surreal ,” McEvoy says. “… I got a couple hours sleep and the next morning our whole staff, they became part of the support for all of the firefighters and allied resources that came out here.”

Even as grandstands smoldered and burned as late as Monday, the generators and light towers that had formed the infrastructure of the PGA TOUR event were redeployed to help in this real-life disaster.

The Safeway Open also had plenty of bottled water, sodas and snacks left over from the event to donate to the relief effort. So the Army Reserves brought two Humvees and the operations staff loaded them up with the extras.

“It was definitely a unique experience,” McEvoy says. “On one hand, as residents, my wife and I are in the same boat as everyone else. Then on the other side of things, we were able to get involved as much as we could to support everyone on the front lines for the fire.”

McEvoy remembers getting texts from Steele, who was about to board a flight to Malaysia where he would play in the CIMB Classic the following week. Steele sent another one once he landed.

“He wanted to check on all of us and say, hey, is everyone are right? What can we do?” McEvoy recalls. “… We definitely felt the support in word and spirit from players, tournament directors, PGA (TOUR) staff and caddies across the board who have relationships with everyone here on the ground.”

One of the more lasting images of the first 48 hours, at least from a golf standpoint, was the skybox burning at the 17th hole of the North Course on Monday. But overall, the resort’s two golf courses escaped relatively unscathed.

Approximately 150 homes on the surrounding hillsides, though, weren’t so lucky, and nearly 400 buildings in the area were destroyed overall. The Atlas Peak fire was savage, killing six and burning more than 51,000 acres. There were 25 more deaths from the Tubbs and Nuns fires in Sonoma County where Santa Rosa was particularly hard hit.

Uhlshafer heard the knock, and almost simultaneously, his cell phone, which he had left upstairs, rang. His wife Karen called out; it was McEvoy, their good friend, on the other end of the line.

“It's like, what, 10 o’clock, 10:30 in the evening?” Uhlshafer recalls. “It was kind of odd to get both a call and knock on the door at that time.”

When Uhlshafer opened the door, he saw a representative from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection standing there. He wanted to see if he could go into their back yard to assess the fire – which is what McEvoy had called to warn them about, as well.

“And I said, do we need to get out of here,” Uhlshafer remembers. “And he said, no, I don't think right now you do. I said, well, I've lived here a little while and if you can see the fire from my backyard, I think it's probably a good idea that we go.”

Ulshafer and his wife were planning to fly to Cabo San Lucas the following morning, so they had packed two duffle bags and put their laptops and passports in their carry-ons, all of which were stashed by the front door waiting for a 6:30 a.m. pickup.

“Once the Cal Fire guy was there, we both decided that we would just load the bags in the car and evacuate at that point and then see what happens,” Uhlshafer says.

The couple never got to Cabo.

Karen Uhlshafer called and found a room for them at a hotel about five or six miles from their home at Silverado. She got the last reservation there as people scrambled to get away from the fire.

“It seemed like that was safe, although at that point, you know, nothing is totally safe,” Uhlshafer says. “So you're always on the alert, especially with winds like that, if something was going to shift. There was obviously smoke in the air all the time and so you knew exactly what was going on.

“And then the distance from the hotel, you really could see the glow in the hills.”

Uhlshafer and his wife didn’t return to their neighborhood for several days. Their home, which overlooks the fifth green and sixth and 13th tee boxes on the North Course, was destroyed.

The only thing left standing in the rubble was a two-story stone fireplace.

Uhlshafer also lost a fully-restored 1959 Corvette convertible that had been featured at the Silverado car show a few months earlier. Oh, and a lot of what he jokingly calls “defective” golf clubs.

Andrews and her husband were roused from their sleep around 10:15 p.m., as well. A friend who was leaving the Mansion Lounge at Silverado called to warn them that there was a fire on Atlas Peak.

“Jim looked at me and I said, it's probably just a little plume,” Andrews recalls. “People make such big deals of things here in the country club. You know how that goes. And he said, all right, honey, let's just go back to sleep. “

Five minutes later, Dwyer’s wife Cindy called. We’re leaving, she said. You should, too.

“It still brings tears to my eyes, the devastation that we saw,” Andrews says. “We live up on the hill and we can see the golf course. We can see vineyards, we can see that veterans home in the city of Yountville. We have a spectacular view.

“And to see the flame so close to our home. And so aggressive. It had this weird sound, sounds that just come out of nowhere.”

She started packing, grabbing a folder with their passports and throwing sweat pants and sweatshirts into a suitcase. She packed a few extra volunteer shirts, too – which she wore for the better part of the next two weeks.

“Somebody said to my husband -- because we weren't allowed to come back -- can you please make sure Myrna buys some clothes because we're sick and tired of that red shirt,” Andrews says with a laugh.

The couple headed to their daughter’s home, then later to a hotel. As they left their neighborhood that Sunday night, Andrews started honking the car horn as loud as she could.

“I thought, if you're sleeping, wake up,” Andrews says. “There was no alarm. I was calling my friends up in the hill, the fire was just so intense. …

“I was just either leaving messages until they answered or talking to them. Wake up. We have a fire.”

The name of the road that the Andrews and Dwyers live on? Burning Tree.

Dwyer’s wife woke him up to tell him about the fire. He went out on their deck, saw the blaze and knew what had to be done. He estimates that he and his wife had about 15 or 20 minutes to gather up some belongings and outrace the fire.

“We left behind so much that we kind of kicked ourselves about,” he now says.

Among the things he wished he had saved was his coin collection. He caddied at the Olympic Club in San Francisco as a kid – he’s a 50-year member at the prestigious club -- and would use his earnings to buy coins. Nothing survived the relentless heat.

“It was just molten,” says Dwyer, who has lived in Napa since 2005. “The silver and even the copper-headed pennies were all just melted together. I had some gold coins and that was all melted, too.

“And my grandfather's watch, his gold pocket watch; I was able to resurrect that and that was all destroyed and all the gold had washed off the brass casing.”

For a while that Sunday night, they waited in the dark with their friends in the parking lot of Nob Hill Foods, which is about a mile and a half from Silverado, desperate for information. The smoke was heavy and the fire glowed on the hillside.

“Nobody knew anything,” he says.

Eventually, the Dwyers headed to their son Jeff’s home on the west side of Napa. Once there, they discovered it was being threatened by another fire so the family went to Dwyer’s office near the riverfront downtown.

About 2 a.m., they decided to go back to Jeff’s house to try to get some sleep. But 90 minutes later, they got word the conditions there were getting more dangerous so they headed back to the office.

On Monday afternoon, Dwyer received a call from Jim Andrews. Dwyer’s house had been hit hard.

“My interpretation of that was OK, maybe I lost some of the house and maybe the rest of it's still standing,” Dwyer says. “But I actually got up there Monday afternoon and realized the devastation and the house was completely flattened.

“Just it was nothing, nothing left.”

Next door, the Andrews’ house was standing, windows shattered and smoke-damaged, but it would be livable again. It was one of only five homes in their neighborhood of 16 that survived.

“They were probably more upset about our losing our house than we were, I mean, they were just devastated by it,” Dwyer says. “That shows really true friendship and that they are great, great people.”

Dwyer is rebuilding on the same lot next to his friends. In fact, he met with the contractor 10 days ago and the footings for the foundation had already been dug out.

“He’s going to be probably putting in rebar and forming it in the next couple of weeks,” Dwyer said. “So hopefully in the next three weeks, the new foundation will be re-poured."

On Tuesday morning at 6 a.m., Andrews’ nephew, who works with the Sheriff’s Department, took Myrna and her husband up Burning Tree Road. Firemen were putting out a blaze in their backyard.

“They saved it,” Andrews says, a hint of wonder in her voice nearly a year later. “A bunch of young kids. And so I said, can I go in the house and give you some food? And they said, no, you cannot come near.”

So her husband told the firefighters to feel free to break a window and get some blankets because it was getting cold. Help themselves to food and water, too.

About two months later when the Andrews were able to return home they found a note taped to the mirror in the guest bathroom downstairs. It was a message from the firefighters, members of a fire department that traveled from 50 miles away.

Thank you for your hospitality.

Fittingly, on the bench by the front door of the Andrews’ house when the couple returned was the pillow she had put in advance of the upcoming holidays. On it was the word “Thankful.”

“When we came up I gazed at the ground and said, ‘Why, why did my friend's house burn and mine not,’” Andrews recalls. “You get that guilt feeling. …

“Our house survives. I took a picture of the front door and the pillow. We're so grateful and thankful for that. It happened somehow.”

The clean-up took about six weeks. Crews took rugs and draperies to be laundered, and repairs were made. But Myrna and Jim finally got back into their home.

“There was still some smoke, but not as bad,” Andrews says. “It was OK for us to come back and sleep in our bed and get some kind of normalcy as they call it.

More normalcy returns this week when the Safeway Open presented by Chevron kicks off the 2018-19 PGA TOUR season at Silverado.

A tournament that raised nearly $4 million for charity in its first two years has earmarked 100 percent of its ticket sales in 2018 to benefit fire relief efforts in the area. And that’s on top of the $200,000 committed to the relief effort after last year’s event.

It’s a delicate situation, to be sure. People lost lives. People are still rebuilding in the hills around the resort. But the Safeway Open is part of the fabric of the community, too, and it’s a chance to showcase the resiliency as well as look forward to better things to come.

“It's definitely a situation that we're very respectful of,” McEvoy says. “But in a lot of ways I think this year's tournament is a celebration --not of the fire itself, but of the bond and the community that we have here in Napa,

“Everyone at Safeway and Chevron are truly proud to be a part of this community and proud to be able to rally around this tragic incident and help support and rebuild where we can in the Napa Valley.”

Andrews and her husband will be volunteering. Dwyer will again entertain clients in his skybox at the 18th green. Billy Idol, Sammy Hagar and Young The Giant will entertain. Celebrity chefs Thomas Keller, Morimoto and Charles Palmer will be there, too.

The way Dwyer sees it, the tournament is a great opportunity to reintroduce people to Napa.

“Napa's back, open for business -- come out to get your massages and get your wine and have a great time,” he says. “It's a very positive, very positive thing. The PGA TOUR and Safeway should be very proud of the tournament they're hosting here because the field just keeps getting better each year and it's a great venue.”

Andrews is excited to see all the tents and skyboxes being constructed. She doesn’t want the players or spectators to be worried about what they might find when they get to Silverado.

“You can see the bright colors out there in the tents and these suites that are setting up,” she says. “And I send back to the players that we are looking forward to your arrival.

“The energy of the tournament, it's exciting to see.”