The Alaskan Bush People had just settled into their new Washington home when dangerous wildfires threatened to destroy everything the Browns had struggled to build.
In Sunday’s all-new season finale of the Discovery show, the family prayed that the wildfires consuming acres of the surrounding wilderness wouldn’t devour their land, as the smoke overtook their homestead.
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“Fire is normally something we try and get and now it’s a threat. If fire does catch on the mountains we have a lot of land, it could even be a little bit before we know what happens,” Snowbird Brown explained of the danger facing her family.
“Another sucker punch to the bread basket,” brother Gabe added, referencing the previous flooding the family faced earlier in the season.
The Browns were also nervous about a potential lightning strike igniting things on their side of the border.
“Lightning strikes can and will strike fires, and even if it’s not our land … there’s nothing to stop the fire from sweeping over into our land,” Bam Brown explained.
And while the family hopes that the fires that had broken out over the Canadian border wouldn’t affect them, five separate blazes sparked up around their land, coating their home in smoke.
“I’ve never seen that much smoke,” Bird said, looking out over the Pacific Northwest forest. “The fires are just that close.”
Luckily, the Browns’ fire prevention strategies, which included clearing their land of dry brush and building an alert horn, were successful and the family was able to keep their property safe.
One project the Browns were particularly fearful of losing was the barn they had been working to build all season as the starting point of their ranch.
Dad Billy Brown revealed his desire to run a ranch earlier in the season stemmed back to his childhood in Texas.
“You can’t grow up in Texas with horses and not have it get under your skin. I had fought so hard, so long to try and pull something like that off, and got really close but didn’t quite make it,” he said, adding, “Everytime our livestock has babies and we keep it and it grows, it’s gonna stay there. It’s gonna be something y’all tend to later.”
He later told his family, “We fought hard in Alaska to have a self-sustaining lifestyle, renewable resources and things like that,” he said. “Here, those things are right in front of us. Everything that you’re relying on for food and work and everything else comes from this barn.”
Thank goodness the fire didn’t bring the Browns back to square one!
Photo credit: Discovery
