Karen Morris
A native bay area resident, Karen has always considered the Santa Cruz Mountains home. In 1988 she and her husband bought property on Trail Ridge Rd, where they built their dream home. After attending the first Fire Wise Community meeting, she was all in. She quickly met with all her neighbors forming the first Central Summit Fire Wise Community Pod. With 100% neighbor participation they work together fire-hardening their homes and properties. Karen is looking forward to working with other neighborhoods to form their own pods.
Mike Hochleutner
Mike moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2017. The Camp fire in 2018 and the CZU Lightning Complex fires in 2020 opened his eyes to the risks of wildfires in the region, especially as drought conditions persist. He is focused on helping residents raise awareness and education, both to improve the resilience of individual properties as it relates to wildfires and to improve communication among neighbors for planning and response purposes.
Lou McTamaney
I have resided in Villa Del Monte since 1989 and I am currently the CFO of the Santa Cruz Mountain Alliance. Over the last four years I have worked with the Alliance to secure funding for and to facilitate the implementation of the recently completed Summit Road / Highland Way Corridor Shaded Fuel Break Program and have worked with the Santa Cruz Fire Safe Council to secure funding for a similar program along Soquel San Jose Road. I gathered and organized data for and helped to complete the application for Firewise USA recognition for our community. I currently serve as the Central Summit Watershed Firewise Community Data Manager.
Rick Parfitt
Rich Parfitt moved to Summit Rd in 1986 and helped grow the Santa Clara County FireSafe Council into a sustainable and collaborative organization supporting stakeholders in all of the County’s Wild-land areas. Over the years, he has helped establish community chipping programs, an Early Warning Wildfire Detection System, multiple evacuation routes for 95033 residents, and wrote the local addendums for the last two Community Wildfire Protection Plans. He will be serving in an advisory capacity on the importance of Defensible Space, safe evacuation routes, and the need for community-wide wildfire safety plans. Rick is currently laser-focused on the insurance issue and how we can address it.
Steve Stewart
A Villa Del Monte resident for almost 30 years and a board member of the Summit Watershed Protection League (SWPL), Steve has been responsible for managing the various chipping and clearing programs that donations to the SWPL and various county grant programs have supported over the last several years. As part of working with both Santa Clara and Santa Cruz County Fire Safe Councils, he was introduced to the National Firewise USA Recognition Program, which the SWPL Board agreed should be a goal to achieve for our community. After many months of wildfire mitigation and home hardening efforts, our motivated neighborhoods completed the steps necessary to become nationally recognized as a Firewise USA community in October of 2023. Steve currently serves as our Resident Leader.
Ron Aldana
Ron, a native of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a graduate of Los Gatos High School, purchased his family home in 2022 and opted for early retirement to focus on fire-hardening his ranch full-time. After attending a FireSafe Council of Santa Cruz meeting on Firewise Communities and their Home Ignition Zone (HIZ) programs, he promptly volunteered and became a certified HIZ Assessor. Today, he provides HIZ assessments to local mountain residents and is actively working to extend the Central Summit Watershed Firewise Community's boundaries from Trail Ridge Road to Old Santa Cruz Highway.
Lynn Wubbels
Lynn Wubbels and Emily Stark have owned almost 40 acres at the end of Trail Ridge Road, which is adjacent to the San Jose Water Los Gatos Creek watershed property, including 1400 feet of property lines on both our northern and eastern boundaries. We acquired this property in 1989, just 4 years after the Lexington fire in 1985 that burned every square inch of this property, including a couple of homes above us, as well as roughly 10 miles comprising the entire Los Gatos Creek watershed canyon. It was sobering to see the aftermath of that fire still much in evidence on our property at the time of our acquisition.
Fire hardening was a major objective that drove the extensive clearing and fire hardening we undertook.
Hardening included cleared brush and dead trees downslope from our house on roughly 15 acres out to 1,000 feet downslope. build ponds with 5m gal of water accessible to fire resources, as well as placing roughly 100k gal of permanent water storage in tanks on site. We mow approximately 20 acres of the property and the result is no fire ladder to our structures. Most of the hardening work took place 25 years ago at a considerable cost.
All water on site, including the ponds, is available to fire teams with hydrant connection access to pump trucks. The fire captain has been to our property, located resources, placed markers, and advised he will place resources on our property in the event of another fire since we have water, safe defensible space, and our hardening, together with their resources, will protect the properties above us all the way to Summit Road. Our cleared space can also be a refuge to other displaced fire refugees, if needed.
Our house has a steel roof, gutter guards and minimal combustibles within a 200 foot radius and more importantly, 1000 feet is cleared downslope. We have been an enthusiastic partner with San Jose Water with respect to the forest land treatment they have undertaken on adjacent watershed woodlands. We are also enthusiastic supporters of the Fire Wise plan for our group.
Lynn Wubbels and Emily Stark