Spokane Fires Stir Catton Memories, Emotions

Kraken centerman Berkly Catton spent a good part of his final junior hockey season touring the neighborhoods in and around Spokane on electric bicycles owned by the billet family he lived with.

Catton was a Spokane Chiefs star player at the time, but still a teenager at heart when it came to exploring new places on the e-bikes alongside his billet family’s 12-year-old son. That’s why Catton was so devastated this past week when billet family members and some of his other Spokane friends shared smartphone videos they’d taken of the devastation wreaked by area fires that destroyed more than 900 residential and commercial buildings while forcing at least 65,000 people to be evacuated from their homes.

“Me and my billet brother would go biking all the time and I remember seeing a lot of those spots,” Catton, 20, said. “And to see it all gone now is just heartbreaking. My condolences go out now to all of those families that have to deal with that stuff now. It just sucks.”

One man, Aaron Farinacci, 37, has been arrested and charged with starting the Old Trails Fire, one of three blazes that rampaged through Spokane County scorching more than 10,000 acres of land. Farinacci is said to have told police he’d planned to set the fire for weeks and had been waiting for optimal weather conditions.

For Catton, who played three full seasons for the Chiefs and parts of a fourth before making the Kraken roster last season, Spokane is more than just the place he landed on hockey’s map. Beyond leading the Chiefs back to the playoffs, getting drafted at No. 8 overall by the Kraken two years ago, then making the Western Hockey League championship round in spring 2025, it’s also where he came of age.

“I think of it as a growing place for me,” he said. “I mean, I came in as a kid that was 15 years old and left as an 18, or 19 year old. So, I grew a lot there. And with the people there, it’s a tight knit place. A bigger city but still tight knit and everyone knows each other.

“And I just think it’s a spot that will come back from this.”

His billet family, Grant and Jennifer Barnes and their son Parker and daughter Hadley, had taken him in at their 5,000 square foot rambler style home in a distant suburban North Spokane neighborhood about a 25-minute drive from the arena during Catton’s final Chiefs season. Junior hockey players leave home at an age where they’re usually too young to live on their own and so billet families paid by the team often serve a vital role keeping them not only housed and fed but properly grounded and guided.

In Catton’s case, Grant Barnes owns a hard cider company and so would help Catton with routine financial matters such as starting up a bank account, or paying parking tickets. Catton met up with the couple and their kids at the end of his debut NHL season and gifted them with a Kraken jersey he’d autographed

Last weekend, that jersey was one of the first things Barnes and his wife grabbed when their family was forced to flee their home.

“There was ash dropping down from the sky and you could see the flames in the distance,” Barnes said. “We got the official text telling us to, ‘Get out, now!’ and so we immediately did. We grabbed the things that mattered most, obviously stuff like photos of us and our children. But then after that, we also had some souvenir sticks some of our past players had given us as keepsakes of their time with us. And then my wife goes, ‘The jersey! We can’t forget Berkly’s jersey!’”

Barnes and his family opted to voluntarily return to the home the following day after the fire line halted less than a mile away. Their neighborhood was right near some of the worst parts of a blaze spreading across an adjacent hill and planes had dropped an ample dosage of bright pink fire retardant on it from the skies that prevented flames from reaching their property.

His young daughter now refers to where the retardant landed as “The Pink Street” because of how it covered the roadway.

“There’s a neighborhood not far from here where they’d been building all new homes back when Berkly was still playing here,” Barnes said. “He told me he remembered one of the homes being built because it was a very large project. Well, that got burned down. A lot of those homes are gone.”

His own home remains under a Level 3 evacuation threat – the highest possible – given winds can shift at any time and start the flames back up anew. But they’re hanging in there for now, in a neighborhood rimmed by police checkpoints to limit access, rather than going to a hotel or shelter, hoping things remain relatively stable.

Catton feels for the family, who he refers to as “great people” and says he feels awful they and others have to go through this. He plans to drive through Spokane and visit friends when heading to Kraken training camp in a few weeks and has reached out to his former Chiefs team to see whether he can help in any way.

He remains haunted by the video images he’s seen.

“Seeing the spots that I remember, whether it was driving or just biking, and now they’re all gone, it’s just very hard. It’s hard to see and hard to believe.”