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Idyllwild Offers Lessons Learned in 1996 Bee Fire for Julian’s Tourism Comeback
BY BRAD GRAVES
A wildfire threatens a Southern California mountain resort. The community evacuates.
Firefighters keep the blaze away from downtown. The town reopens. Yet merchants say the bad publicity keeps tourists away.
The tale is not Julian in the wake of the 2003 Cedar fire or the 2002 Pines fire.
It’s Idyllwild after the 1996 blaze called the Bee fire.
The Riverside County resort took a while to bounce back after a wildfire burned 9,200 acres and threatened the town just before the July 4 weekend.
Unlike Julian, no homes burned.
“Things just dropped dead” for merchants who catered to tourists, said Mel Goldfarb, who runs Idyllwild Pharmacy and sits on the town water board.
Goldfarb said he didn’t suffer, because his business caters to the local residents. Yet those in the tourist trade saw businesses drop the rest of the summer.
The town seemed perfectly normal the next year, he said.
Linda Kurz, who operates the Timber Ridge gift shop in Idyllwild, said her business improved after the fire.
“Even bad publicity is better than no publicity,” she said.
Becky Clark, publisher of the weekly Idyllwild Town Crier newspaper, said the town took 2
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