I. Escape from Silver Lake
On the day of the wildfire, Kaye Peterson witnessed three miracles.
The first miracle was that the campers were late. On a normal Friday, caravans of cars would wind the 40 miles west from Spokane, Washington, to Silver Lake Camp, following a one-way-in, one-way-out road from nearby Medical Lake. Each previous week’s 300 or so campers typically departed by 11 a.m., which gave staff like Peterson — who had left her job as a teacher in a Seattle suburb three years earlier to work as the guest services manager and community chaplain at the historic Bible camp — just a handful of hours to turn over the beds, the lodge, and the cafeteria for the next group of campers to arrive around 2 p.m.
But on August 18, 2023, for the first time in all of Peterson’s years of working at Silver Lake, the incoming group had requested a 3 p.m. check-in time…