A Latter-day Saint youth group participating in a pioneer trek reenactment was evacuated from their Idaho campsite Wednesday due to the ongoing Garden Creek fire.
The group, which included more than 250 youth campers from the Draper East Ridge Stake in Draper, was asked by local law enforcement to evacuate from the Sellers Creek Ranch campsite in Iona, Idaho.
Campers loaded up on school buses and relocated to the Latter-day Saint stake center in Iona, where they pitched tents, cooked a meal and plan to carry on with their trek activities.
“This wasn’t on my bingo card for today,” Rodger Cook, the Draper East Ridge stake president, told Apple Valley News.
During the evacuation process, “we told the kids, pack your personal items first, sleeping bags, those kinds of things. And if there’s time, then we’ll take down the tents and everything else,” Cook said.
Cook said the evacuation experience provided him with an opportunity to help the youth relate to their own pioneer ancestors.
“They built temples, they built homes, they put everything they had into their communities and then had to leave on the spur of the moment,” Cook said, according to news reports. “And so this really is giving them a full pioneer trek experience.”
The Garden Creek fire, which started Tuesday afternoon, has consumed over 5,400 acres on the Fort Hall Reservation in southeast Idaho. The blaze jumped the Blackfoot River, which slowed the burn significantly. It is now 80% contained, according to an update from local news on Thursday afternoon.
For Porter Lebaron, a trek participant, the experience felt “very realistic,” he told Apple Valley News
“It was kind of crazy to have to drop the handcarts and be in the commotion of just trying to get everyone and make sure everybody gets out safely,” Lebaron said.
He continued, “When I heard that we had to evacuate, I was just super sad that we were going to have to leave this awesome time we were having, and then there was a lot of confusion, because we didn’t totally know what we were going to do, a lot of commotion of going back and forth, and making sure we knew where everybody was.
“But as we got on the bus and we came here, we all just like started to decompress and had fun again. And I knew everything was going to be OK.”
The group headed home to Utah Thursday evening, a day earlier than originally planned.