Pam Bergman

On a dark night during the 2017 wildfires, Pam Bergman watched the glow of distant flames on the security cameras at her Spring Mountain property. The fire was miles away, near Calistoga. The realization it sparked was not.

“That’s when I understood there was an existential threat to us here,” she says.

That understanding was tested three years later. During the 2020 Glass Fire, the blaze crossed Spring Mountain after burning through forest that hadn’t seen a major fire in more than a century. Bergman, her ranch crew, and firefighting teams spent weeks battling flare-ups and spot fires as flames repeatedly reignited in the drought-stressed woods around her 40 acres. “We had a strike team here for nearly two weeks,” she says, “and then my ranch hands and I kept monitoring and fighting spot fires for another three. It was like an action movie, except it was terrifyingly real.”

Years of clearing vegetation around her home and vineyards paid off. The fire slowed as it reached the treated meadows, giving firefighters the defensible lines they needed. But what Bergman is proudest of isn’t what was saved on her own land.

That conviction — that resilience only works when neighbors act together — is what makes Bergman a Founding Valley Steward.

On Spring Mountain, where roughly a quarter of parcels sit vacant and large stretches of wildland go unmanaged, she helped organize the Spring Mountain Fire Safe Council and brought eight landowners together, combining private gifts with public funding to build a continuous fuel-management zone along that same ridgeline.

Still, she saw the limit of what any one landowner, or even one neighborhood, can do alone. “I have tremendous trust in Napa Firewise,” she says. “They have the tools and expertise to look at wildfire risk on a much larger scale than any one landowner can.”

Her support as a Founding Valley Steward is now funding exactly that scale. Across Napa, landowners are already doing real resilience work — but most of it lives nowhere in CAL FIRE’s operational systems, which means first responders arrive at a fire without knowing what’s there to help them slow it. The Valley Stewards Initiative captures that work, maps it to first-responder standards, and integrates it into Tablet Command, the platform crews use on the line. It’s the kind of countywide intelligence no single landowner could build alone — and it wasn’t possible until Founding Stewards like Bergman made it so.

For her, the stakes are generational. Her property is a multigenerational family project, and she sees every contribution as an investment in the people who will inherit this valley.

“We’re all in this together,” she says. “For those of us committed to being here for generations, participating isn’t optional. It’s a necessity.”