PARADISE, Calif._Amanda Gehrett stood at the top of the steps that once led to the front door of her Paradise home, her hands clasped, watching below as a few men and women in dirty white coveralls sifted through the ruins on a sunny Saturday morning.
The wreckage of her former home contained piles of debris 4 feet high clumped against its remaining basement foundation. Her two-story home had no structure left �� no walls, no roof, not even a brick chimney as some neighbors' houses did. Nothing resembled the exterior of a house except the brick entryway on which she stood and the crumpled wreckage of a garage door.
The Camp fire tore through Butte County for most of November, killing at least 86 people. Many were elderly. Some died in their cars as they tried to escape the flames.
More than two months after California's deadliest and most destructive wildfire started, virtually razing the town of Paradise within days, life's focus for survivors has turned to tasks most never imagined having to confront.
Among them: returning to the ruins of their former homes to look for the ashes of loved ones _ not the remains of the 86 or more who perished directly from the wildfire, but those who died before the blaze.
In closets, on nightstands, on bookcases and elsewhere, many Paradise residents had cremated remains � also known as cremains �stored in their homes, in urns or in other packaging that shattered or burned in the fire.
But using a process only recently discovered, experts can identify and recover the remains.
More than two dozen professional and student archaeologists volunteered recently to shovel, trowel and brush through the rubble and debris that once made up Paradise families' treasured possessions, hoping to recover cremains intermingled with the fresher ash created by the Camp fire.
The effort �� the third of at least four planned expeditions to Paradise toward this cause �� was organized by Northern California archaeological groups and the Institute for Canine Forensics.
It's a concept that was still in its infancy when archaeologists and dog handlers embarked from the parking lot of a Chico hardware store into a still-devastated Paradise.
Gehrett was one of more than 150 people so far who have requested assistance from the cremains recovery campaign. She, and her husband, Mark, and her brother-in-law Robert, lived in a Paradise home surrounded by trees.
Gehrett recalled with a good amount of detail where the remains of her father-in-law had been stored. The digging volunteers looked for clues to help them find what was left of a brown urn that had been kept atop a dresser.
Thanks to two well-trained dogs, which can sniff out bone fragments and other scents of human remnants, the archaeologists had a rough starting point. But the original crew responding to the Gehretts' morning appointment had to call for some extra muscle. Thousands of pounds of debris were piled along the home's rear foundation, where the urn was likely to be.
"You're trying to move a thousand pounds of debris in about an hour," volunteer lead Alex DeGeorgey said at a briefing.
A staffer at Santa Rosa-based ALTA Archaeological Consulting and one of the volunteer effort's four leaders, DeGeorgey gave a rough outline of the process and instructions to the day's volunteers, many of whom had never undertaken anything like this before.
It's a mix of hard labor and detective work �� more shovel than trowel, DeGeorgey said, with volunteers routinely tossing cinder blocks and stray bricks aside.
Making use of property owners' memories of the space and canine sense of smell, the archaeologists identify target areas, and then shovel a moat-like border around those areas.
"It's like making an island," 30-year veteran archaeologist Anmarie Medin said as she pitched ashy rubble into a ditch behind her.
The crews then slow down and begin searching that island for cremains or clues to their whereabouts.
It's not just shattered pieces of a ceramic urn that the archaeologists seek. Potentially scattered throughout the rubble during the chaos of the fire, the cremains can be spread across several feet of debris. They have a slight salmon color and distinct texture, DeGeorgey and others said.
In ideal cases, the dig teams can also recover identification medallions, which most crematoriums place among the ashes.
Amanda Gehrett paced between her SUV in the driveway and the front entrance of her destroyed home, overlooking the sunken basement foundation several feet below.
"We're gonna get down there," California State University, Chico graduate student Steven Brewer assured her before returning to the rubble and resuming his pickax work.
After hours of exhausting work and searching, and after those extra hands had left, Brewer's promise held true. Amanda, who watched quietly and with a bit of awe, left with the ashes of her father-in-law, William Gehrett.
Though the broader study of archaeology dates back a few hundred years, and forensic anthropology goes back several decades, organized efforts to recover cremains from the scenes of wildfires started after California's 2017 wildfire season.
DeGeorgey and volunteers led one of California's first efforts to recover cremains after the October 2017 Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people and destroyed more than 2,500 Santa Rosa homes.
Medin said it was DeGeorgey's consulting firm, ALTA, that figured out that dogs accustomed to more traditional forensic expeditions could sniff out remains in a burned-out home.
Now, it's a process that leaders who organized the volunteer effort say should be a normal part of wildfire recovery effort, mandated by the Federal Emergency management Agency, California Office of Emergency Services and other agencies involved in wildfire recovery.
"If we don't do this, these ashes go to the toxic waste dump," said Michael Newland, the director of Environmental Science Associates' Northern California Cultural Resources Group, and another principal team leader. "We're trying to get on their radar to get that folded in, so that everybody does find about it. So that when FEMA or OES comes and asks how to clean up the house, they want to know if there's human remains inside the house."
Newland, DeGeorgey and the volunteer group's two other principals �� Lynne Engelbert and Adela Morris of the Institute for Canine Forensics �� share the common goal of convincing state or federal agencies that cremains recovery should be the norm after wildfire disasters.
Newland's team on the recent excursion included Medin, an archaeological supervisor with the state Department of Parks and Recreation's Office of Historic Preservation; Chris Sapolu, an archaeology student at Sacramento State and tour guide at the Sacramento History Museum; John Grebenkemper, a handler with the institute for Canine Forensics; and Grebenkemper's 10-year-old border collie, Kayle.
Newland's first full assignment was the recovery of two sets of cremains �� a grandmother and a grandfather _ in a double-wide mobile home at a gated senior living community called The Plantation.
Chrissie Weston, her husband, Steve, and their two daughters arrived at the former residence of her aunt and uncle before Newland's crew returned from Gehrett's property. Their 14-year-old, Ali, found a diamond ring within minutes of searching, but the family wasn't confident that it was her great-grandmother's. Steve and Jayne, 18, looked through broken porcelain for pieces they could use to build a mosaic.
Chrissie's aunt and uncle lived at The Plantation for just three months before the Camp Fire struck. They survived and now live in Modesto.
The Westons took the trip to Paradise to give Newland's team legal approval to enter the property and start searching for the cremains of Chrissie's grandparents. The property was smaller but more treacherous than Gehrett's, with metal support beams still lying horizontally along where the floor once was. A Miata sports car sat roasted in the garage.
"This is amazing," Chrissie Weston told Medin as she signed paperwork before the team started digging.
The challenge, though, was that the family of four had visited the house only twice; they relied on rough memories and verbal instructions from Chrissie's uncle, Gary, over speakerphone to pinpoint the location of the cremains.
Work trucks, some with Pacific Gas and Electric Co., were among the only other occupants roaming The Plantation that morning. Newland said construction crews were scheduled to start clearing out the lot's rubble the next week. This was the last chance to find those remains.
Kayle, the border collie, has the essential job of narrowing down target areas in the house to save time. Having trained her to sniff out human remains, Grebenkemper estimates that he and the dog have traveled 200,000 miles together.
"This was a little more unusual in that she's never done this before," Grebenkemper said. "She's 10 years old and we wanted to see if she could meet the challenge. ... She lives for searching."
In June 2017, the National Geographic Society hired Grebenkemper and Kayle to search for the remains of Amelia Earhart. (National Geographic's findings and analysis from that excursion have yet to be released, and Earhart's fate remains a topic of dispute.) They've also looked for remains of members of the Donner Party, Grebenkemper said.
Kayle works quickly. After humans stand back a few feet and give her nose some room to work, she sniffs eagerly through the homes, and then hunts for cremains. When she finds the scent of them, she sits down.
It took Kayle less than five minutes to mark two target areas.
Eventually, clues led Newland, Medin and Sapolu from Kayle's starting point in the bedroom to the nearby bathroom and then an adjacent closet, where Chrissie's uncle Gary recalled that the ashes � kept in two cardboard boxes � had been kept on a shelf near cowboy hats.
Next came the detective work. After a few false leads, Medin found fiberglass, indicating that she was in the bathroom rather than closet. Then she found a boot spur � getting warmer. Then she located a destroyed light fixture, which the uncle said was directly across from the closet's shelves.
Eventually, Sapolu found a piece of burned leather �� either boots or a cowboy hat, the team figured �� and after about 20 more minutes of isolating and troweling, Newland noticed the salmon tinge of human ashes. They were not, however, able to find a medallion before they had to move on to the next assigned home.
The cremains were placed into a large Ziploc-style plastic bag and handed over by Medin to an overjoyed Chrissie Weston.
On that Saturday, the teams found 19 sets of cremains, and 53 sets were found Dec. 11 to 13. The group has helped 117 families to date, coordinator Lisa Lee said.
This wasn't the first time the Westons' lives have been touched by a California wildfire. In 2012, Chrissie's parents' homestead near Mount Lassen was among about 50 buildings destroyed by the Ponderosa Fire.
"It means so much," Chrissie said. "It's hard knowing they're up here �� alone, in storms �� and it was hard on us. So having them recovered is what needs to happen, and to be back with our family."
Medin said these digs vary in complexity. She said the double-wide mobile home was not a "textbook case," ending without the recovery of a medallion.
Others are easier � on one occasion, the cremains sought were left on a box on top of a bed. Medin's team found them within minutes, as soon as they found the bed's springs.
It's a highly emotional experience for many families. Medin told the story of a woman who had lost her husband of 55 years a few years before she lost her home to the wildfire. His ashes were kept in a cabinet with his ceramic 49ers memorabilia.
"We put this all in the bags, and so the bags were kind of heavy because we had the ceramics mixed with them. And this very petite, tiny woman, she's trying to hold these bags and one of them slips through her arms and I caught it before it dropped on the ground. And I said, 'I'll carry this to the car for you.' And she said, 'No, no, no. I need to hold him.' That's why we do this."
