Scott McClanahan (05) was raised in a family of firefighters. His father and two of his uncles have made battling flames their calling. Firefighting is in his blood. Knowing this, it isn’t hard to believe he was acting on instinct when he climbed on top of the roof of his house and stayed there for a day and a half in order to stop the 273,000 plus acre Cedar Fire from destroying his Descanso home.

McClanahan has lived in the same house in Descanso all 16 years of his life and is quite thankful to still be living there today. He remembers first hearing about a fire in the hills near his house only half an hour before actually seeing it heading straight towards him.

A helicopter awoke him, his mother, and his three sisters at 3 a.m., shining a light onto their house and telling them to evacuate immediately. His family was able to save their five horses, four dogs, and more than ten cats before the fire threatened their home. While he watched his family leave, McClanahan stayed with three other men in order to save his home. Two were firefighters who worked with his dad and one was a man whom they “met on the side of the road,” and none of them knew. “He was some guy from Tennessee,” said McClanahan. “I don’t even know who he is.”

“We cut a fire line all the way around my house, about 25 feet wide,” said McClanahan. “I didn’t think it would come toward my house, and then I saw it coming over the hill.” Once the fire had nearly surrounded the house, “we climbed on the roof because it was the last place we could go.”

They stayed on the roof for a day and a half, with about 20 hoses tied to a well. McClanahan said he was acting completely on impulse. “You don’t have time to think really. I thought about just leaving it, but if I left it I knew it would be gone.”

After the second night, the fire had nothing left to burn, and moved on. Every one of the houses in the surrounding area was destroyed. “I have no neighbors anymore. Every one of them are gone,” said McClanahan.

He said that although his dad feels he did something he shouldn’t have done, he and his uncles are proud of him. “It makes me feel stronger. It makes me feel like I did something right.”

The Cedar Fire destroyed a total of 2,232 homes, including the homes of 103 Granite Hills students and four Granite Hills employees. It could have just as easily been 2,233, and 104. “It made me grateful for what I have,” said McClanahan, “the little things.”

But even though he has the experience, McClanahan does not want to be a firefighter when he grows up. He is actually planning on saving lives another way: becoming a surgeon. “I’m tired of fire,” he said, “I don’t want any more out of it.”