For Burns Lake residents Jesse Bird and Katy Burkholder, a wildfire evacuation was not a good enough reason to postpone their wedding.
After two years of planning, their wedding was set to take place last Saturday in 108 Mile Ranch. But plans had to change after the town was evacuated on July 7 due to the Gustafsen fire.
Instead of postponing their wedding, however, the couple was determined to find a new location.
“We had some family in Clearwater and we thought we could get married there, but then I heard they were also evacuating,” said Bird.
“Katy’s friend knew of a place in the Salmon Arm area that her mom had got married the year before, so they started looking into it and it was available, so we started shifting things there.”
“Katy, her family and friends spent their days on the phone to transfer the event.”
Being a firefighter with the B.C. Wildfire Service, Bird was busy being deployed to a Kelowna flood camp while this was happening.
“We pulled in a lot of resources from our family and friends and they all really gave us a big hand [to transfer the wedding],” he said.
The approximately 60 guests will include Bird’s family from Calgary and Burkholder’s family from the Lower Mainland.
Bird said there’s bit of irony in the fact that he’s a firefighter who’s had to change the location of his own wedding due to a wildfire.
“Some people might look on the dark side of that, but I just think that if we can make through all these trials and tribulations, then I see us having a long lasting happy marriage for years to come,” he said.
“We’ll remember this wedding for our entire life just because of the things we had to deal with,” he added. “Like I said before, it’s a wedding forged in fire.”
Their honeymoon had to be cut short as Bird was expected to return to work on July 25 to help with the provincial wildfire situation.
“We’ll have to wait until the winter for our honeymoon,” he said.
