FIFTY YEARS OF BLAZES CATCHES UP TO HOME.

Byline: Yvette Cabrera Daily News Staff Writer

The Millers dubbed their little piece of rustic solitude ``R Own Ranch'' - a pocket of chaparral and oak trees in Stokes Canyon where Karen Miller's parents first moved back in 1944.

In five decades, the family fought off plenty of fires. Before Monday, they never had to pick up the pieces.

``You just think that it will never happen to you, but this time it did,'' Dan Miller said Tuesday as he combed through what was left of the family's one-story Moorish stucco home, which was destroyed in the two-day-old Calabasas Fire.

In the wind-fanned blaze which burned more than 13,650 acres, the Millers were among the unlucky ones. Theirs was among five residences either damaged or destroyed by nightfall Tuesday.

With only the clothes on their backs, the Miller family, Dan, Karen and their two children, Christine, 14, and Vincent, 12, poked and searched through the debris.

Nothing seemed to have escaped the fire that bullied its way through their property.

``I had already heard the house was gone so I was prepared for what I'm seeing,'' Karen Miller said. ``There's more standing than I thought there would be - not that it matters.''

The family's biggest loss was the $100,000, three-bedroom home itself, which they plan to rebuild. The Millers had no fire insurance because, Dan Miller said, the cost was ``prohibitive.''

A mobile home on the property where Dee Ann Nelson, one of the Millers' friends lived, was also burned. All that stood was a Quonset hut where Miller's nephew and mother-in-law resided.

In the debris of the Millers' home, hundred of records, wilted by heat, lay scattered. Albums from the likes of Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond, had all partially melted away.

Four personal computers, including one which Karen Miller had purchased just three weeks ago, were gone. Clothes that had been toasted light-brown lay in shambles in the master bedroom closet.

When the Calabasas Fire broke out Monday morning, Miller, a post office worker in Reseda, rushed home to check on his children, who are both being home schooled.

Miller's plan was to defend the ranch using a fire hydrant located on their property, but his plans quickly changed when his nephew, positioned on a ridge above the property, yelled: ``Get out of here.''

Miller spotted the spiraling smoke and loaded up his two children and mother-in-law in the car and sped down the winding dirt road to find a swarm of firefighters battling flames at the entrance to Stokes Canyon Road.

Vincent was only able to grab a book and his POG collection, while Christine Miller, an avid writer, left clutching her notebooks.

The last person to leave the ranch was Nelson, who attempted to ride her three horses out of the canyon. She got the horses out with the help of firefighters who took the reins while she drove their pickup truck.

The family made it out of the canyon safely and headed for the post office in Agoura Hills, where Karen Miller works, and then spent the night at her brother's house in Newbury Park.

``It was an inferno,'' Nelson recalled Tuesday. ``When I laid down to sleep and closed my eyes last night all I could see were the flames.''

CAPTION(S):

Photo

PHOTO From left, Christine Miller views the ashes of her St okes Canyon house Tuesday while her daughter, Karen, and niece, Alexis Smith, pet the Miller family dog David Sprague/Daily News