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Family loses 1907 cabin to California wildfires

"It was a two-story cabin. It had cut glass, crystal windows in three of the bedrooms...."

This fireplace and chimney are all that remain from the cabin built over a hundred years ago by the family of Santa Rosa, California resident Sandra Stone…

"I started coming here before I can remember with my mother and my grandmother. And my grandmother's parents built this cabin in 1907."

The getaway cabin in Brookdale, California burned to the ground during the CZU Lightning Complex fire that ignited last month and swept through San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties, razing to the ground more than 86,000 acres and many of the homes in its path.

That fire is just one of an unprecedented number of wildfires sweeping across California, Oregon and Washington State - spreading a trail of death and destruction across some 4.5 million acres, ravaging several small towns along the way.

Stone was hoping her family cabin had been spared. All she had to go by was footage from neighbors' surveillance cameras, which showed the fire department coming and going. But then came the pictures and the harsh reality that a century's worth of history had gone up in flames.

"We would go from thinking it was gone for sure to being hopeful that it was still here. We knew it was here for a day, and so it was a rollercoaster ride of up and down and when we finally saw the photographs from the embedded photographers that come up with the fire department, that was really helpful to actually know that it was gone."

It still took Stone about two weeks to mentally and emotionally prepare to see it for herself.

"My reaction actually started further down the road with the rest of the residences that were no longer and it made me really sad because I can picture them here and now I can picture them gone."

Her family wants to rebuild but Stone is unsure. She says she has no idea how long that could take and what work will be needed...but she is sure of one thing:

"Everything that's important is still here. The trees are still here. The creek is still here. And it'll be beautiful again in no time....

This will be tough here but we'll keep going. Everybody does."