It was one of those summers where the heat and dryness were impossible to ignore as parched brush and blistering temperatures quietly turned the landscape into a tinderbox. Already, smoke from a distant fire drifted across the horizon, a hazy reminder of just how easily a spark becomes a blaze. For a long time, this narrative told the story of the worst urban disaster in the city’s history: the Great Spokane Fire of 1889. That is, until nearly a century and a half later, and almost on the calendar date, the Old Trails Fire ignited, writing its own chapter and forcing area residents to flee. Among those displaced was Jeffrey Maichel, a retired accountant whose experience during the evacuation left him with a lasting appreciation for the Spokane Police officers working the Five Mile checkpoints.
Smoke on the Horizon: The Day the Old Trails Fire Started
It was a Saturday like any other. Maichel, newly retired at the age of 70 after selling his Spokane accounting firm in May, had nothing more pressing on the agenda than running a few errands; hauling a few leftover appliances from a recent kitchen remodel over to a storage unit he owns. His daughter, visiting from New York, had come along to help.
It was the kind of quiet morning a retiree earns. Born in Montana and raised on a ranch where hard work was a daily constant, he had spent decades navigating high-stakes professional environments after earning an accounting degree at Montana State University. He passed the CPA exam and moved to Spokane in 1984 to work for Coopers & Lybrand, one of the historic “Big Eight” accounting firms. From there, he held a string of financial executive positions before starting his own firm around 1994, auditing publicly held companies in the mining and manufacturing industries.
As his career grew and business improved, both he and his wife decided it was time to pursue a lifelong dream of a home with a bigger view. They spent a couple of years scouting the Five Mile Rim before finding the perfect fixer-upper with a storied history behind it as the first home ever built on the southeast Five Mile Rim back in 1960.
“After two years of remodeling, we moved in and loved it,” Maichel said.
It was everything they had ever dreamed of, until the view from their porch became a smoke-filled nightmare.
From Errands to Evacuation
That morning, as Maichel and his daughter left for the storage unit, he noticed a plume of smoke already rising in the distance to the west.
“I got a very weird vibe from it,” he shared. “I can’t really explain it. Whether it was instinct or intuition, it made me uneasy and a little fearful. With the size of that smoke plume and the velocity of the wind, I could tell it was bad news.”
They kept an eye on it in the rearview mirror on the way to the storage unit, unloaded their things, then swung by Andrew Rypien Field to throw a boomerang around. Taking separate cars, Maichel’s daughter headed back toward Five Mile while he drove through Hillyard and stopped at the Big Sky Tavern to catch a classic car show.
Then his phone started blowing up.
“Friends who knew where I lived, and who were also on the northwest side of Spokane, were calling to tell me how serious it was,” Maichel said. His daughter called next, saying she’d barely made it back up to Five Mile. Cedar was already closed, forcing her up Hawthorne by Whitworth to come in the back way.
Maichel started racing back himself, but by the time he reached Francis and Monroe, everything was blockaded.
With the house out of reach, he headed to a condominium he and his wife own at Mount Spokane, only to find that Inland Power had already shut off electricity there as a precaution. He stayed on the phone with his wife and daughter, urging them to get out quickly and walking them through the important items to grab. From there, they were able to make it out safely, spending the next nights at their son-in-law’s house.
“I’d never been through an evacuation like that in my life,” Maichel shared. “I saw some scary wheat-field fires growing up on the ranch, but nothing remotely like this.”
Navigating the Checkpoints: Humanity on the Front Lines
Maichel spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights at the Mount Spokane condo, while his wife and daughter stayed with their son-in-law. Early reports suggested the evacuation might last 24 to 36 hours. Nobody expected Five Mile to be closed for a week, and by Tuesday, Maichel had a problem. He had medication at home that he was instructed to take every day, and he hadn’t had it in four days.
Realizing he couldn’t go without it any longer, he headed to the checkpoint at Waikiki and Five Mile, where a National Guard officer was sympathetic but bound by strict orders allowing no one up. He then tried again at the Cedar and Country Homes Boulevard checkpoint, where he hit the same wall of rigid military protocol.
When Maichel pressed his case, explaining his urgent medical crisis to the guardsman, he was pointed toward a Spokane Police patrol car parked in the middle of the street with its red and blue lights flashing.
The contrast was immediate.
“I walked over to two young, pretty buff-looking officers and told them about my medication,” Maichel said. “They paused for a few seconds and asked, ‘You’re parked in the veterinary clinic lot, right?’ I said yes. They told me, ‘Go ahead and move some of those cones and go up to your house if you wish.'” No follow-up questions, no ID request, no hesitation beyond that brief pause to think it through.
Maichel went home, took his medication, and stayed there from Tuesday until the following Sunday, when the Level 3 evacuation was finally lifted.
Spokane Police Department: Treating People Like People
That moment at the checkpoint is the one Maichel keeps coming back to and the one he wrote about afterward, in a letter to the Spokane Police Department and the Mayor of Spokane.
“They had to make a judgment based on the information they had and on the person standing in front of them. I was an older guy telling them a straightforward story about medication I needed, and by Tuesday they apparently also had information that the east side of Five Mile was not likely to be threatened.”
“So, when I said they ‘treated people like people,’ that’s what I meant. That’s what good cops should do. I can’t imagine what they see every day, good people, bad people, and everybody in between. In the end, we’re all just people. They made a judgment call, and I think it was the right one.”
In the letter, he put it this way: “Whenever I asked a question, I got a straight answer. More than that, the officers seemed to understand that the people coming to those checkpoints were worried about their homes, their belongings, their pets, and what might happen next.”
He adds, with a laugh, that he isn’t a fool. “I have a mountain bike, and if things had turned dangerous, I would have been the first one out of there. Besides, from my house it’s all downhill!”
Getting Answers: Why the Plateau Stayed Closed
For days, Maichel couldn’t understand why the entire plateau stayed closed even as the wind died down. The answer came during a supply run, when his wife’s cousin, visiting from Italy, brought him food at the checkpoint. There, Maichel struck up a conversation with a Spokane Police sergeant who finally explained it: there are only four main access points to the Five Mile plateau, five if you count the dirt road behind the Five Mile Rosauers.
“He told me that during Saturday’s evacuation, people were coming down some of those access roads and panicking because traffic was so heavy and moving so slowly,” Maichel said. “Some were simply leaving their cars in the road, taking their keys and running down toward Waikiki.”
That’s when it clicked. “With everybody trying to evacuate at once, it could become like rats trying to get off a burning ship,” he said. “Suddenly the decision to keep the plateau closed made perfect sense to me.”
That conversation is what pushed him to write his letter, not just to the Police Department, but to the mayor’s office as well. “I tried to memorize his last name,” Maichel said, “but I failed.” So, officer, if you’re reading this, Jeffrey Maichel, and so many others, thank you.
Coming Home and a Final Word for Officers
Maichel’s first real look at the damage came two days after the Level 3 order was lifted. “It was heartbreaking. It looked like a battlefield after the battle,” he said. “There was a kind of reverence to it, like the feeling you have in a church or a cemetery.” He couldn’t bring himself to drive into the neighborhoods that had burned completely. Back at his own house, ash and debris had blown into the driveway, but the home itself was untouched. “I felt incredibly lucky,” he said. “I felt blessed.”
Looking back, Maichel wants his gratitude to extend beyond the letter he sent. He draws a distinction between the National Guard, who were bound by strict orders, and Spokane Police, who had room to exercise judgment. “Officers are constantly required to use discretion, subjectivity and judgment in dealing with people and situations,” he said. “We need to support police officers who can make those judgments with a sense of humanity.”
Maichel’s quick to credit the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office and the National Guard, too. But it was the officers at the Five Mile checkpoints, the ones who gave him a straight answer and, when it mattered, a little grace, that stuck with him enough to put pen to paper in a show of thanks.
