Alia Phillips thought she might never see her wedding ring again.

But even on her engagement anniversary, it was low on her list of concerns as she drove her Prius through orange smoke and falling flaming branches. The Mountain Fire ravaged residential neighborhoods in Camarillo Wednesday morning, burning homes, fields and trees in its wake.

Phillips had left work that morning to watch her 18-year-old dog, Little Miss, and turn on her sprinklers when she first heard about the fire.

It had started quite a long way back. To reach his three-story home on East Highland Drive in Camarillo Heights, the fire would have to jump over Highway 118, through fields, then up a mountain.

But by the time she checked her house, everything changed. The sky had turned completely orange. It was hot and the wind was getting stronger.

“‘Baby, the fire is here. I don’t know how. It’s here,'” she told her husband over the phone. “There weren’t even any fire trucks in our neighborhood yet.”

She grabbed the dog and cell phone chargers and tried to leave, but a firefighter told her it was too late. The only road leading to the neighborhood was ravaged by flames. Ashes rained from the sky.

The firefighter, Phillips said, told her it was safer at that time to stay at her house.

It wasn’t long before the house began to fill with thick smoke. Her husband asked her to get their gas mask. As she briefly stepped outside, another firefighter saw her. This time, the instructions were very different.

“You have to go – now, now, now,” he shouted.

As she left the house and closed the door, Phillips saw embers floating in the house. She thought the house was going to catch fire.

“I really didn’t want to burn to death in my house,” she said.

Phillips threw Little Miss into the car and pulled out of the driveway onto East Highland Drive, which was on fire. The trees surrounding the street were on fire and flaming branches were falling into the street, on top of his car. She couldn’t see anything because of the smoke. On one side, the road comes out onto a steep cliff. The car was overheating. She rolled over burning logs.

“You don’t see anything and you just hope for the best. I was hyperventilating in the car. My husband was on the phone. He told me, ‘You can do this,'” she recalled. “It was a complete miracle. I don’t know how I made it out without falling off the cliff and burning to death.”

There wasn’t much time to rejoice in his escape.

They discovered Wednesday evening that their house had been completely destroyed by the fire. There’s nothing left. To accentuate the pain of the loss, the fire occurred on the couple’s third engagement anniversary.

Phillips was unable to retrieve her wedding ring as she escaped the house. It was in a drawer in the bathroom on the second floor.

And this drawer, like the house around it, had been reduced to ashes.

Captain Kevin May of the East Fork Fire Protection District and his crew had come from Douglas County, Nevada to help fight the fires.

His engine was assigned to East Highland Drive in Camarillo Heights on Thursday. They were responsible for neutralizing hot spots and flare-ups. The main objective was to protect the three out of seven houses that had not burned the day before.

Throughout the day, May spoke with residents who returned to the neighborhood to survey the damage. He saw the couple who lived at 711 E. Highland Drive. There wasn’t much he could do for them. Their house was lost.

“I offered to look for a safe or anything they might have lost in the rubble,” May said.

But the couple did not have a safe.

“She said, ‘The only thing that matters to me is my ring, my wedding ring,'” May said.

May told Phillips that he and his crew would look for him. But he told her not to get her hopes up.

“A needle in a haystack would be easier to find than a ring in this house,” he told the couple.

The firefighters nevertheless got to work. They dug into the still-warm ashes and positioned themselves where the couple thought the bathroom would have been. Then the detective work began.

They found the twisted frame of a sofa, which may have been on the floor above the bathroom. They scraped away more debris and eventually found a bathroom sink faucet.

“We started to get the feeling that maybe there’s a chance we’re in the right place,” May said.

Next, an earring. When May showed it to Phillips, she said it came from the same drawer as the ring. More digging.

According to the couple, veneer stones covered the bathroom counter. A bracelet. Tweezers. It’s warmer.

“Probably not 60 seconds later we found the ring,” May said.

It was hot in the ashes and May kept it in her glove until it cooled. He presented it to Phillips. It was dirty, covered in soot. But it wasn’t distorted. All the diamonds were still in place.

“It slid right off her finger,” May said.

The entire search took about 10 minutes.

“The chances were so slim and we all knew it. It happened so fast it was unbelievable,” May said.

That seemed almost as important to the firefighters as it did to Phillips, May said. They couldn’t have helped much. Everything was already burned by the time they reached the street.

Later that night, May’s motor ended up in the couple’s driveway, where they parked for dinner. It felt like it was the right place. The couple had left, but the firefighters had returned.

May took out her phone and sent a message to Phillips.

“Thank you for allowing us to be a part of this moment,” he said.

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This story was originally published in Los Angeles Times.