Beyond the Flames: A Family Touched By Fire

by Heather Smith Thomas

Wildflowers have returned to the rangeland around Salmon, Idaho, making it hard to recall the charred landscape left by the Clear Creek fires more than a dozen months prior. Thick smoke shrouded the valley as the blaze destroyed everything in its path—timber and buildings and livestock and almost the life of Heather Smith Thomas’s daughter.

***



A SUMMER OF FIRE; A TIME OF TESTING

Just before midnight on July 5, 2000, Heather and Lynn Thomas received the phone call that every parent dreads, the call that tells them one of their own has come to harm. “Andrea has been burned,” their neighbor said. “She’s being brought to the hospital by ambulance.”

The Thomases rushed from their ranch via Idaho’s Highway 28 toward Salmon, twelve miles away, not knowing the extent of their daughter’s injuries and unaware they were beginning a journey which would leave them, their family, friends and community forever changed.

358 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2004

About the author

Heather Smith Thomas grew up on a ranch near Salmon, Idaho. She is the author of 20 books and thousands of articles on animal health care. She began writing stories for children’s magazines while still in high school and wrote articles for horse and farm publications to help pay her way through college. She wrote her first book, "A Horse in Your Life: A Guide for the New Owner," during the summer between her sophomore and junior year of college. She and her husband Lynn Thomas have been raising beef cattle and a few horses on their ranch in central Idaho since 1967. Most of her books and articles deal with horse or cattle health care, breeding, or handling. Her goal has been to learn all she can about the care of horses and cattle, and to share this with her readers. One of her books, however, discusses an entirely different subject. "Beyond the Flames" tells about her daughter’s severe burn injury and how this changed their lives.