Rising From the ASHES: After surviving the worst wildfire in California's history, the students of Paradise High School are trying to put their lives back together.

• Author: Levin, Dan
• Position: NATIONAL - Camp Fire

Gabe Price was having another rough day. As he had every morning since escaping the deadliest wildfire in California's history, the 17-year-old had woken up beside his father on a sagging air mattress at his grandparents' house, now crammed with four extra people and a dog. Stress filled the cramped rooms like smoke, always on the verge of flaring into another argument.

Home--or what he had until recently known as home--is a pile of ashes. Paradise High School, where he's a senior, is cordoned off in an evacuation zone. Lessons are now all online, and Gabe desperately needed to find a Wi-Fi signal. So there he was, walking through a Muzak-filled shopping mall, where the Paradise school district had converted a former LensCrafters into a temporary school, wedged between a JCPenney and a toy store.

"This is the most stressful environment I've ever been in," says Gabe, over the buzz of Spanish and algebra lessons nearby. "There's nowhere I can get fully comfortable, and I've got so much work to do."

The 2018 fire season has been the most devastating and the most deadly in California history. Across the state, more than 8,000 fires have burned close to 2 million acres. The fires have killed at least 103 people, including six firefighters. Scientists say California's wildfires are getting more severe because of climate change, which has made the state both hotter and drier, and thus extremely vulnerable to fire.

At Least 88 People Dead

The worst of this year's fires was the Camp Fire--named for Camp Creek Road in Butte County, where it started-- which killed at least 88 people and destroyed more than 18,000 buildings in Paradise and neighboring towns. In the months since the blaze, those who fled have urgently searched for housing and normalcy, many still reeling from nightmares of the flames. The burden is particularly acute for Paradise High's Class of 2019--240 seniors whose post-graduation plans have been derailed by more pressing challenges.

For Gabe, hanging over his current circumstances is an even bigger worry: how to pay for college. As captain of the track team whose season ended at a state meet a few weeks after the fire, he had hoped for an athletic scholarship. But with no track nearby to improve his running times, he fears that his best-laid plans may also fall victim to the wildfire.

"It's not just me," he says. "My entire grade is having to rethink our futures."

A tight-knit community that was already struggling economically-- 67...