When Denise Gant and her husband awakened at 1:30am in the middle of the night to flames and smoke as the Pfeiffer Fire roared to life early Monday, they got in the car with their four cats and left their Clear Ridge home.
They'd been instructed to evacuate and go to the grange, Gant says, but halfway down the road, her severe asthma kicked in.
"It was smoky, so we went the other way," Gant says.
They turned around and headed to Monterey, landing at the Denny's on Fremont. "We ran into another refugee from Big Sur there, someone whose house totally burned down," she adds.
Tuesday morning, the scramble began for people without homes or evacuated from smoky homes near the fire lines and a quest for places to stay. Gant called in to work at the Big Sur Riverside Campground to let them now she might not come in that day.
"They said, 'You've got a room,'" Gant recalls.
So she and her husband, along with cats Mongo, Sonia, Freya and Hyla, have been holed up in a Riverside cabin all week.
"The most amazing thing for me is that they put us in this wonderful place to stay and didn't charge us," she says.
With about 100 people displaced as firefighters work toward 100-percent containment and county damage assessment teams let people back onto property, there could be a major scramble to find housing—but there hasn't been, many Big Sur residents say.
Many neighbors have offered up homes, and local hotels have been giving out rooms to those in need at no charge.
At the River Inn, which is still open to tourists and had a few people planning to check in on Wednesday, two rooms were housing displaced locals. With lots of cancellations to the fire, there was plenty of space, said Andrea Velasquez, who was working the front desk.
One room was housing River Inn owner Alan Perlmutter, who evacuated from his Pfeiffer Ridge home—which was spared.
Perlmutter and GM Rick Aldinger were finishing lunch and talking strategy Wednesday afternoon in case the fire spread and they were forced to evacuate. The first item on the list: Take the computers.
Their biggest concern is getting people back post-fire. "The impression lasts," Perlmutter says. "It's tenacious. People will call in a month and say, 'Is the fire out yet?'"