The first six months of 2025 were difficult for Dustin and Raychel Hatch.
Raychel was diagnosed with breast cancer and was undergoing intensive treatments to slow its progression. She’d stepped away from her full-time duties as a stenographer administering ultrasounds for women with high-risk pregnancies for Intermountain Health, which had her shuffling between the Park City Hospital and the Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, leaving Dustin as the family’s primary breadwinner.
Luckily, Dustin’s business was going well. His company, Frontier Woodworks, specialized in handcrafted doors and millwork and had become a staple of the Francis community since he established it on Spring Hollow Road in 1995.
His daughter, Sydney Thompson, also operated her own successful business on the same lot — a flower shop providing bouquets and other arrangements for local weddings and funerals.
The couple’s luck seemed to be turning around over the summer. Raychel’s treatments had been successful, and she won a free three-day rafting trip on the Salmon River in Idaho through River Discovery’s annual lottery for cancer survivors.
The trip was set for July 22. Raychel, of course, opted to bring Dustin as her companion.
But on the final day of the trip, after rafting through the Idaho wilderness without cell service for a few days, the couple re-entered the modern world and immediately discovered something had gone wrong.
“We got back Thursday afternoon around 3 o’clock off the river rafting trip, plugged our phones in because they were both dead, and once they charged, they just went crazy with messages,” Dustin said. “I was expecting it on my phone because I had been away from work for three days, but hers was going crazy, too.”
Raychel called her mom, who quickly picked up to deliver the bad news: Frontier Woodworks and Sydney’s flower shop had caught on fire and burned to the ground earlier that morning.
“I didn’t know what was going on, but I could see the color drain from her face,” Dustin said. “My first instinct was somebody was dead. … That’s when she said the shop was burnt down. At that point, I said, ‘Is that all? Nobody’s dead?’ And then we had an eight-hour drive home.”
The drive gave the couple time to think about their next steps, but it was a situation that was unfortunately familiar to Dustin. His workshop was already destroyed by a fire once before in 2005.
“It wasn’t nearly as big of an operation as I have right now, but I was deeply in debt,” he said. “It literally has taken me probably 18 years to recover from that, between being in debt for all the equipment that I had purchased, since it was still fairly new and only four to five years old and annihilated in the fire, and then having to get more equipment on top of that. It was just a huge amount of stress, but we made it through.”
This time, most of Dustin’s debt had been paid off, something he said he was especially grateful for since it’s difficult, if not impossible, for insurance companies to cover woodworking shops because they’re considered too high-risk.
For example, Dustin said he tried to run a fire suppression line into the main shop to hook up sprinklers in case of a fire, but his insurance company told him they wouldn’t cover any damages if he were to do so.
“The guy said, ‘Well, if one machine goes bad and sets off the sprinkler systems, it’s now ruined $1 million worth of equipment, and we don’t want to take that risk,’” Dustin said. “So then it’s like, OK, what do you do? What’s the answer?”
Overall, Dustin said there was a $2 million loss because of the fire — $1 million for equipment and $1 million for the building. He doesn’t expect to receive more than $200,000 from his insurance company.
But during the 550-mile drive back to Francis, Dustin and Raychel weren’t thinking about insurance or the 2005 fire or even how to rebuild the shop. Instead, they had only one goal in mind: helping Sydney with the loss of her business.
“She had two weddings and a funeral that weekend, so that was our biggest concern,” Dustin said. “We made a makeshift cooler, put her flowers in it at her house, and that’s where she’s been working out of the past couple of weeks. She pulled the weddings off, did the funerals without a hitch. It looked great, so that was a positive thing for us to get through that.”
After Sydney’s weekend events, the family pivoted to the monumental task of digging through the wreckage, hauling off debris and figuring out what to do next.
“We spent some time waiting for dumpsters to arrive so we could start the demolition, and once they got here, it was full-on,” Dustin said. “We started tearing it down. My feeling is the sooner it’s gone, the better. I won’t have to look at it anymore. It looked apocalyptic.”
Dustin said he’s hoping to have the shop up and running again in the next six months, but he recognized it was a lofty goal. His reasoning for the rapid-fire pace is simple, though — he wants to retain both his clients and his 10 full-time employees, all of whom are local to the Kamas Valley.
Part of the reason equipment costs so much, and makes Dustin’s re-opening timeline so difficult, is the business’s specialization in custom-made doors. The Frontier Woodworks website specifically points out the shop’s ability to create both interior and exterior doors, provide hardware for “the perfect finishing touch” and design custom millwork, or any decorative wooden material, a contractor or homebuilder might need.
“I have contractors that I work for that have been nothing short of amazing with their support and patience,” Dustin said. “Some of them don’t quite understand the severity of the whole thing because they will still call me and say, ‘I need this. When do you think you can get it for me?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t even have a tape measure.’”
The family is clearing the debris themselves. Raychel’s son, Mason Leavitt, estimated they’d hauled away 13 large dumpsters of material in just two weeks. They’re borrowing an excavator from one of the contracting companies Dustin works with, and Sydney’s husband, Levi, is running the heavy equipment because of his previous work experience on his family’s sawmill.
“It’s been Levi on the excavator, Mason on a small tractor and a couple of local retired guys with shovels and brooms. It’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen,” Dustin said.
He continued, “I have a good friend, Brad Murdock, and he walks his dog over here every day, and every morning he stops in to say hi. He’s been here a couple of times to work. He came in this morning after being here yesterday, and he’s barely walking. He’s struggling, and he’s like, ‘I can’t even bend my knees. Is it alright if I don’t work today?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re not obligated to work. I’m not hiring you. Go home and take it easy for a while.’”
In a way, Dustin and Raychel said the whole experience has reminded them of how kind others can be, offering a glint of hope and optimism in an otherwise difficult time. The local gas station organized a donut drive to raise money for the Hatches, for example, and community members passed around a hat for cash donations at the Summit County Fair.
“Through all the bad, there’s a lot of good,” Dustin said. “My faith in humanity has grown exponentially with just the goodness of people in the community, outside the community, people that don’t even like me who are like, ‘Come here and give me a hug.’ … It really has renewed my faith in the goodness of people in a time where all you hear is bad about a lot of stuff, which just goes to show you can disagree on things and still care for one another.”
Brayden Powers, a community member and friend of the Hatches, set up an online fundraiser within hours of the fire on July 24. The page has since received almost 200 donations, climbing to $47,920 of its $50,000 goal as of Thursday afternoon.
“You just have to live through it to appreciate what’s going on, and it does help,” Dustin said. “I talk about a $200,000 piece of equipment, but what people are doing is such an emotional, uplifting thing that it makes you want to fight harder. Everybody’s pushing for you to be successful again, so who are we to say, ‘Woe is me. This is the second time it’s happened. My wife has cancer. My dog’s getting older.’ You can find a million reasons to give up, but the people pushing for you to be successful, it makes you fight harder. It makes you work harder.”
Raychel said that before the shop is up and running again, she’s using the remaining office building to host workshops for the community as part of her new business: The Garage at Spring Hollow. The classes cover a wide range of topics, including photography, floral design and making homemade pasta, taught by locals with experience in each field.
All of the proceeds from the workshops go directly to the Hatch family as they try to rebuild Frontier Woodworks, she said, and more information on how to sign up is available on Instagram and Facebook.